We allow members to freely register DOI records for titles that do not yet exist in our system. Term 2d of our membership terms states:
Rights to Content. The Member will not deposit or register Metadata for any Content for which the Member does not have legal rights to do so.
This means that either the journal owner or their appointed publisher can register DOI records for a title.
When the first record submission related to a new title is processed, a title record is created in our database. This title record ties the title to the prefix belonging to the first registrant, and this member becomes the “owning member”. From this point, new DOIs for content in that specific title can only be created on the owning member prefix. If another member wishes to register DOIs for content belonging to that title, they can’t do this unless we move ownership of the title in our system to them. Only one member can be the owning member for a title at any given time.
Title ownership transfers in our system are really common and usually straightforward, and we follow our standard title ownership transfer process. But very occasionally there’s a disagreement between two members about who should be registering DOIs for a specific title, and the member who wants to take ownership of the title in our system becomes the “disputing member”. In these very rare cases, we follow this process:
