Cheapest way to get DOI

bjohas
Hello,

We have a small international development project, for which we are cataloging documents (mostly PDF), to be released under Creative Commons. We'd like those to be importable to Zotero with metadata retrieval. My understanding is that the safest way for that is to use a DOI.

What is the cheapest way for us to do that?

For example, we could join crossref (for a year) at $275, then plus ~ $1 per DOI. That's not so bad if we just do it one off. It would be better for us to be able to pay $1.50 per DOI, and not have to worry about membership.

For example, Crossref seems to allow organizations to join as members, who then support others in getting DOIs: "https://www.crossref.org/fees/ If you’re an organization who works with or publishes on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that want to register content with Crossref, you’ll be set up as a Sponsoring Member or Sponsoring Organization Sponsors. Both types of sponsor work directly with us in order to provide administrative, technical and if applicable, language support to the communities they work with."

Does anybody know such an organisation, that has sponsoring membership of crossref?

Any other ideas on how to get DOIs cheaply?

Many thanks!
Bjoern
  • LiborA
    If your documents are under Creative Commons then you can upload them on researchgate.net and there you can get DOI without any costs.
  • bjohas
    Ah great - that's excellent! So I can definitely do that for my own CC works, which is really useful.

    Do you know whether there's institutional accounts on research gate? I know institutions are represented, but it may just be the collection of researchers.

    My scenario is one of a non-governmental organisation collecting reports (from various projects). They are CC, but they are authored by those projects, not by the organisation. So the organisation would effectively be uploading on behalf of those projects.

    (For reasons of connectivity it's unlikely the authors of the reports from the projects will upload themselves.)

    In principles, it's legitimate (in terms of CC) to distribute materials, but in terms of authorship, there may be a problem.

    Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
    Bjoern
  • zurpher
    You might want to check out da|ra: https://www.da-ra.de/en/home/

    da|ra is the registration agency for social science and economic data jointly run by GESIS and ZBW. They provide free DOI numbers.

    Please be aware that ResearchGate is a commercial entity. Their DOI service also serves self-promotion.

  • bwiernik
    Rather than researchgate, I would recommend http://osf.io for a non-commercial place to get a DOI for free.
  • bjohas
    @zurpher @bwiernik - thanks for much for this too, very helpful!
  • adamsmith
    Da-Ra is certainly a good option, but you'd be responsible for administrating the DOIs, including assuring preservation in the long-term.

    I'm not particularly fond of ResearchGate, not so much because they're for-profit, but because they're providing terrible metadata, e.g. to Zotero.

    When we were looking to provide DOIs for articles in an academic newsletter that were getting cited with increasing frequency, we got the authors' consent to re-license them under a (fairly restrictive CC-NC-ND) CC license and put them on Zenodo, which is run out of Cern and provides an excellent interface as well as the ability to designate papers as part of a "community": https://zenodo.org/communities/qmmr-newsletter/


    figshare provide a similar service, but are for-profit (though arguably with a nicer interface).
  • bjohas
    @adamsmith Many thanks - which ones have good Zotero integration? E.g. the connector for Zenodo doesn't seem to provide full metadata. The site does look good though.
  • adamsmith
    Zenodo should work well with Zotero, what problems are you seeing?
  • bjohas
    Actually, I think it's ok - there are many datasets, and I'd just opened a few of them, which came up as document (with no attachments copied to Zotero). Following your post, I looked for actual papers and books, and that works! Sorry!
  • bjohas
    edited February 1, 2018
    Do any of you know about workflow integration with Zotero? E.g. OSF says "OSF integrations make your workflow more efficient" and mentions e.g. Google Drive and Mendeley. Would it be worth sending OSF an email to see about Zotero integration (not connector, but e.g. connecting via Zotero API to list certain libraries)?
  • adamsmith
    OSF connects to Zotero already.
  • bjohas
    Ah yes, so it does: http://help.osf.io/m/addons/l/524150-reference-management-add-ons. Shame that's not on the front page as Mendeley is....
  • bwiernik
    If you email OSF about that, they tend to be responsive.
  • adamsmith
    Are we sure they don't rotate the feature tools? I was sure I had seen Zotero displayed prominently in the past. It's very prominently listed if you actually connect a tool to an OSF project.
  • bjohas
    I've loaded the list a few times, and it doesn't seem to rotate. I'd like to speak to them about a planned project anyway, so I've email them.
  • bjohas
    > Rather than researchgate, I would recommend http://osf.io for a non-commercial place to get a DOI for free.

    Btw. just to add: it seems that osf.io only offers a DOI per community, rather than per publication.

  • adamsmith
    that's incorrect. You can get DOIs for individual preprints on OSF such as https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9N7W8

    (in other news, in case you missed it, OSF just improved its Zotero integration: http://help.osf.io/m/addons/l/850029-connect-zotero-to-a-project )
  • bjohas
    Ah yes - indeed. Sorry, I was confused between OSF projects (that only have one DOI, and DOIs for files within projects aren't available) and OSF preprints, where you have a DOI per preprint (... which of course can be used in projects, and thus that's a way of getting DOIs for files in projects).
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