DOI registration for journals in India
How a journal registers DOIs through Crossref, what a complete record carries, and what we do in the journal's own name. Every figure on this page comes from the public registries, and the links open them.
Read your DOIs back, free
Every DOI of the journal tested at doi.org and Crossref; the blanks in each record named; nothing sent anywhere until you say so.
A new DOI from what you have
The PDF, the Word file, the article page or the JATS file is enough: Smart Deposit reads it, the journal checks the record, Crossref registers it.
What Crossref charges
The membership fee by revenue and the fee per DOI (lower for older articles) are on Crossref's own fee page — we quote no figure of our own for them.
Questions people ask
What is a DOI, and who registers one?
A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a permanent name for a published work — 10.xxxx/yyyy — that always leads to the work's current page, wherever it moves. DOIs are registered through Registration Agencies of the DOI Foundation. For journal articles, books, chapters, conference papers and theses the agency is Crossref; for datasets it is DataCite. A journal does not "buy a DOI" from a website: it registers a record with an agency, and the DOI is the name of that record.
How does a journal in India get DOIs?
By joining Crossref as a member (an annual fee by the publisher's revenue, plus a small fee per DOI registered — Crossref's fee page states both), or through a Crossref sponsoring member that holds the membership for smaller publishers. Either way the journal receives a prefix (10.xxxx) and registers one record per article under it. Smart Scholars does that work in the journal's own name, under the journal's own membership: the journal keeps its prefix, its records and its account.
What must a DOI record carry?
The title, the authors, the journal and ISSN, the volume, issue, pages or article number, the date, and the article's own page. A COMPLETE record also carries the reference list, the abstract, each author's ORCID iD, affiliation and ROR ID, the funder and grant number, the licence URL, the full-text links for text mining and Similarity Check, and — for journals with a Crossmark policy — corrections and retractions. Crossref's Participation Report for every member shows which of these its records carry; a journal with blanks in it is a journal the indexes read incompletely.
Can older articles get DOIs?
Yes. Crossref calls them backfile DOIs and charges them at a lower per-DOI rate. Every article a journal has ever published can be registered, as long as each has its own page on the journal's site for the DOI to lead to.
What goes wrong with DOIs?
The commonest faults: a DOI that leads to a dead page (the site moved), a record without references or abstract (so the article earns no Cited-by count and the indexes show nothing), a record under a wrong ISSN, two DOIs for one article, and a journal whose site prints DOIs that were never registered at all. Each is found by reading the public record back, and each can be put right.
What does Smart Scholars do, exactly?
DOI Doctor reads every DOI of a journal at doi.org and Crossref, finds the article's current page when the registered one is dead, fills the record's blanks from what the journal already has — the PDF, the article page, the JATS file — and sends the repair only after the journal approves it. Smart Deposit registers a new DOI from the same sources. New DOIs for a whole backfile are a one-time project; keeping the records complete is a monthly service.
What a complete record does for a journal
Crossref's Cited-by counts a citation only when the citing article's record carries its reference list. OpenAlex, Google Scholar and the discovery services read the abstract from the record. DOAJ reads the licence URL. ORCID adds the article to each author's profile from the ORCID iD on the record. A record with those four blank is an article the world reads less of — and the Participation Report shows every journal's blanks in public. What each element does →
