FAQs

Questions and answers about the TIB DOI Consortium.

 

Where can I get DOIs?

It is possible to register DOIs as a direct member of a Registration Agency or as a member of a DataCite consortium.

Registration agencies

A list of Registration Agencies of the International DOI Foundation (IDF; governing body of the federation of Registration Agencies providing DOI services) can be found here: Registration Agencies - Areas of Coverage.

Below are three registration agencies suitable for the registration of scholarly and professional research content.

DataCite

If you are interested in direct DataCite membership, please visit https://datacite.org/become.html for more information on membership. The support team at support@datacite.org will be happy to assist you.

We recommend becoming a direct member of DataCite if you register more than 10,000 DOIs per year. If you register more than 10,000 DOI per year, you are also welcome to become a member of the TIB DOI Consortium.

Crossref

If you are interested in becoming a Crossref member, please visit https://www.crossref.org/membership/ for more information on membership. Crossref specializes in the registration of text publications.

If you wish to switch from the TIB DOI Consortium to Crossref, we will be happy to assist you in transferring your DOIs to Crossref. Please bear in mind that when you switch to Crossref, your DOI names will remain, but will have to be re-registered with the metadata of the Crossref metadata scheme. Your existing prefix will also be transferred to Crossref.

 

DataCite DOI Consortia

The following DataCite DOI consortia exist in Germany:

  • DOI Consortium NRW
    The hbz offers a DOI consortium for the universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. Information about this can be found here: FAQ zum DOI-Konsortium.
  • SUB Göttingen Consortium
    The SUB Göttingen acts as DOI provider for the cultural sciences and humanities in Germany. Further information can be found here: How-To: Getting an identifier.
  • DARA Consortium
    GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics offer the DOI registration service in Germany for social science and economics data. Further information can be found here: Become a DARA Consortium Organisation.
  • ZB MED DOI Consortium
    ZB MED - Information Center Life Sciences offers a DOI service for DOI registration of research data in the life sciences. Further information can be found here: DOI Service.
  • TIB DOI Consortium
    TIB offers non-profit organizations in Germany to participate in the TIB DOI Consortium. Further information can be found here: Become a member.

An overview of all DataCite consortia can be found here: https://support.datacite.org/docs/datacite-consortia.

 

Are there alternatives to setting up a DOI registration service?

If you only need a few DOIs, an alternative to independent DOI registration can be to use the services of institutional or subject-specific repositories if these already register DOIs. Subject-specific repositories where you can publish your research output and assign DOIs can be found here: https://www.re3data.org.

Another alternative would be to use a generic service such as Zenodo.

Please contact us if you have any questions about these alternatives so that we can find a solution that works best for your use case: doitibeu.

 

How long has the TIB DOI Consortium been in existence?

The German central libraries (TIB, ZB MED, ZBW and GESIS and the SUB Göttingen) have been awarding DataCite DOIs in their subject areas since 2010. From 2012 until the end of 2020, the German subject libraries have borne the DataCite fees for this. DataCite changed its membership and cost model in April 2020. The subject libraries are dealing with these changes differently. TIB has established a DOI consortium with effect from 01.01.2021. The DOI service fees will be settled with the consortium members according to the DataCite cost model.

 

Do I have to reserve a quota of DOIs in advance?

No, any number of DOIs can be registered at any time. There are five tiers in the TIB DOI Consortium fee model. The DOI fee is calculated according to one of these tiers, based on the number of DOIs registered in the previous year.

 

How many repository accounts can an institution have?

It is possible to set up as many repository accounts as you see fit as  administrative units for an institution, e.g. in order to be able to manage multiple repository instances within the organization. These repository accounts and their prefixes do not have a cost impact. Please see detailed information about the account structure on the DataCite’s support pages: Consortia.

 

Can multiple institutions use one Consortium Organization account?

A Consortium Organization account enables an institution to set up repository accounts and register DOIs for its various services e.g. OJS instances, journal series, research data repositories, departments, institutes, faculties, libraries and so on.

An institution may not register DOIs for other institutions.

 

Will my research output become more visible if you get a DOI?

DataCite DOI metadata are harvested from different platforms. For example, DOIs with the resource type "Dataset" are harvested into Google Dataset Search, where applicable. The BASE search engine and the research information system OpenAIRE are harvesting the DataCite database at regular intervals.  

 

Can prefixes and DOIs be transfered  from other Registration Agencies?

If an institution has registered DOIs via another consortium (e.g. Gesis) and wishes to join the TIB DOI Consortium, the prefix and DOIs can be transferred. Please contact the TIB DOI Consortium Team (doi@tib.eu) to discuss and initiate the process.

If DataCite DOIs and prefixes need to be transferred, the existing repository account including the associated prefixes and DOIs will be transferred to the TIB DOI Consortium. 

The duration of the transfer depends on the number of DOIs. During the transfer, all services are in operation (resolutions, DOI imprinting, search, link checking, statistics, metrics). 

The DOIs already registered will not be changed by the move. The existing prefix(es) will still be available to you after the move.

If an institution has registered DOIs via another registration agency (e.g. Crossref) and wishes to switch to the TIB DOI Consortium, a prefix transfer can be carried out. The already registered DOIs have to be newly created in the DataCite metadata schema. Please contact the TIB DOI Consortium Team (doi@tib.eu) to discuss and initiate the process.

 

Does the DOI point to the metadata (description) or directly to the object?

In compliance with best practice guidelines, each DOI is linked to a resolvable URL, which should always points to a landing page. A landing page contextualizes and provides the following information:

  • citation recommendation
  • descriptive metadata
  • licensing information for reuse of the object
  • a link to all supporting documents
  • how to access the object
  • and if applicable: links to subsets, persistent queries, other versions 

More information about landing pages can be found here: Best Practices for DOI Landing Pages

 

Do we need rules for our DOIs?

Institutions should develop a set of rules and procedures to support DOI registration and management including:

  • To which records is a DOI assigned e.g. all published records or only those records associated with a peer-reviewed publication?
  • At what level of granularity are they assigned e.g. data file level or collection level? Consider how the data can be reused and cited.
  • How will changes to metadata or data (updates, versions) be handled?
  • Who is responsible for maintaining the persistence of DOIs? (i.e. resources, roles and responsibilities).

The following examples are a good starting point, although each institution will likely have local factors to consider: