Memberships and commitments
What we belong to, what we have asked to join, and what we hold ourselves to. Three lists, kept apart on purpose: a membership we have applied for is written here as applied for, and moves up only when the body's own answer is in hand.
Last updated: 19 October 2026 · Trust and security · About us · Responsible research assessment
In effect
Each line names where the body itself shows it.
- Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) — member; listed in the body's own member directory. See the listing ↗
- Crossref Service Provider — accredited by Crossref, Basic tier, from 1 October 2026 (Crossref's letter of 10 October 2026). The programme ↗
- Statutory registrations — MSME (Udyam) and the Telangana Shops & Establishments Act; both numbers, and where to verify them, are in the Verified bar at the foot of every page.
Asked for — sent, not yet answered
Applications and requests we have sent. None of these is a membership yet, and we do not describe any of them as one.
| Body | What we asked | Sent |
|---|---|---|
| DOI Foundation ↗ | Affiliate Membership — the application mail to info@doi.org | 16 October 2026 |
| DataCite ↗ | Membership inquiry as the lead of a consortium of Indian universities, colleges, research institutes and learned societies — DataCite replied on 19 October 2026 offering a call | 16 October 2026 |
| CNRI — Handle.Net Registry ↗ | A Handle prefix of our own, for a five-year term (the registry's resolution service runs on the Handle.Net software) | 16 October 2026 |
| Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information ↗ | To be listed as a supporting organisation | 16 October 2026 |
| Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) ↗ | To be listed as a supporting organisation | 16 October 2026 |
| DORA — the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment ↗ | An organisational signature — filed; on 19 October 2026 DORA asked for the link to our public statement, which our form had not carried, and we are sending it. DORA lists a signature only after its staff approve it | 17 October 2026 |
| Crossref ↗ | Membership in our own name, for the content Smart Scholars itself publishes — specifications, policies, reports, newsroom posts; never for other organisations' content, which stays under their own memberships or sponsors | 17 October 2026 |
ORCID — our integration is being built in ORCID's sandbox (sandbox credentials issued 1 October 2026); membership follows the certified integration, not before.
What we hold ourselves to
- Responsible research assessment — we show no Journal Impact Factor and no quartile; where a journal's citations or a journal's grade count in our tools — the Journal Trust Rating, the Research Integrity Desk, GetIndexed's checklist and Risk Radar — the statement says where, and by how much. The statement →
- Open metadata — every record in our Registry is published under CC0; anyone may read, search, download and reuse it for any purpose. The registry's terms of reuse →
- Open references and open abstracts — every record we deposit for a client carries its reference list and its abstract, openly, when the article has them — the principles of I4OC and I4OA, applied before any listing.
- Preservation — the PKP Preservation Network plugin is installed on our journal hosting (16 October 2026) and is switched on for each journal as it is created, so its articles are preserved outside our servers.
- What we write is yours to reuse — newsroom posts are licensed CC BY 4.0. Licences →
- No citations for sale, no guaranteed acceptance, no impact factor claimed — how it works →
What we are not
Smart Scholars is not a DOI Registration Agency and does not describe itself as one. DOIs for our clients are registered through Crossref — by Crossref's sponsors and by publishers who are Crossref members — and, once DataCite approves the consortium, through DataCite. Our own Registry keeps the master record and the history of every DOI we look after, publishes them openly, and is being prepared, in the open, for an application to the DOI Foundation. The registry's governance →
