- There are four classes of membership: General, Registration Agency, Charter, and Affiliate. General, RA and Charter Members are entitled to vote, Affiliate members are not. Note that membership is NOT required in order to be a customer of a DOI Registration Agency and to assign DOI names.
- General Membership is open to any organization supporting the development of the DOI system. It is a prerequisite for any organization applying to become a Registration Agency as a first step. The annual fee for General Members is $US 35,000. This fee may be reduced by the Board, subject to a minimum fee of $US 11,500 per annum.
- Charter Membership was initially established for the founding organizations to support the development of the DOI through loans. There are currently no Charter Members and all loans have been repaid.
- Affiliate Membership is open to any organization interested in the DOI system. The annual fee is $US 2,000. Affiliate members are not eligible for Board membership and cannot vote.
Existing General Members
RAiD is designed to address key challenges faced by researchers, research organisations, funders, infrastructure providers, and others in the research ecosystem—maintaining consistent and up-to-date information on projects throughout the research lifecycle. The Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) is a persistent identifier (PID) and global registry dedicated to research projects. It is governed by ISO standard 23527:2022, with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) as the Registration Authority and lead developer of the system. RAiD provides a system to store, update, share, and link project information across the research community. RAiD facilitates the administration and reporting of project information. ARDC and DataCite have partnered to deliver RAiD services. RAiD is being integrated with European Open Science Cloud infrastructure via the FAIRCORE4EOSC program.
Existing Affiliate Members
DiSSCo (the Distributed System of Scientific Collections) is a new world-class Research Infrastructure for Natural Science Collections. DiSSCo aims to create a new business model for one European collection that digitally unifies all European natural science assets under common access, curation, policies and practices that ensure that all the data is easily Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR principles). DiSSCo represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanic gardens and collection-holding universities in the world. DiSSCo is all about services. It will create a unique access point for integrated data analysis and interpretation through a wide array of digital services provided by its community.
IFRRO (the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations) is an independent non-profit membership association. They facilitate the collective management of reproduction and other rights in text and image works through the cooperation of their member Reproduction Rights Organizations.
Who are the users of DOI?
There are two kinds of users of DOI. There are those that wish to uniquely identify something using the DOI system. We call these “registrants”, and there are those that want to resolve a DOI.
The registrant can be any individual or organization. They register DOI names with a Registration Agency. If a registrant has multiple types of content or application requirements, they may choose to use several RAs to provide services. Registrants are responsible for content management of their own material (maintenance of URLs and data), either directly or by contract (e.g. with RA). Registrants do not have to be members of the DOI Foundation, they are customers or clients of a Registration Agency. They may or may not pay for their services depending on the business model of the RA.
Users can be any person or machine that wants to resolve a DOI. They do not have to be members and may use the DOI Foundation proxy as often as they like. DOIs are, and will always be, free to resolve.