Membership Qualifications and Rules

Qualifications for Membership

Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA) is a not-for-profit membership organization. PILA runs the CrossRef service, enabling links to and from online scholarly content. According to the PILA bylaws, membership is open to any organization engaged in the business of publishing original scholarly materials.

The following conditions must also be met to qualify for membership:

• The Organization applying for membership must publish primary scholarly content that is available online in full text.
• The Organization must submit metadata, as defined by PILA, for substantially all its content that is online in full text. 
• In an Organization with multiple divisions, the largest legal entity is considered the PILA member and all divisions are subject to the terms of the PILA Membership Agreement.
• To ensure fairness in reviewing candidates for membership, all prospective members will be required to supply information about the content they intend to deposit.

Review Procedures

• PILA will review and approve applications for membership according to these terms and the PILA by-laws.
• An Organization denied membership has the option of having the membership application reviewed by the Membership Committee of the PILA Board of Directors.

Membership Rules

1. Members must pay the fees listed in the CrossRef Schedule of Fees.

2. New members must pay their initial annual fee before they can receive their prefix and account access information.

3. Members must assign DOIs and deposit metadata for all their online journal articles with CrossRef. Members are strongly encouraged to assign DOIs and deposit metadata other content types for which metadata is accepted by CrossRef (i.e. including but not limited to books, book chapters and conference proceedings, technical reports, working papers and theses and dissertations), but this is currently not required. Members are expected to assign DOIs and deposit metadata on a current basis (i.e. content should be deposited in CrossRef as soon as possible after being published) and if they fail to do so for journal articles, action may be taken.

4. Members have an obligation to maintain the metadata and URLs associated with all registered DOIs.

5. Before a member may retrieve DOIs for references in an article from a particular journal, the member must be depositing articles from that journal on a current basis.

6. Members have an obligation to link references in the journal articles they deposit via CrossRef. The Membership Agreement states that a Member has an obligation to actively maximize and maintain its own Cross-Linking to other members of PILA or other qualified users of the PILA System. If a member is not linking a majority of current journal content after 18 months of membership, a non-linking fee will be assessed. Members are encouraged to link references in other content types for which DOIs are deposited but are not currently required to do so.

7. Members may "cache" retrieved DOIs (i.e. store them in their local systems).

8. Members may appoint Agents to act on their behalf with CrossRef (registering metadata, looking up DOIs). An Agent can represent any number of members. For example, HighWire Press can act as an Agent for CrossRef members.

9. The copyright owner of content has the sole authority to designate, or authorize an agent to designate, the depositor and resolution URL for that content.

10. DOI-routed reference links enabled by CrossRef must resolve to a response page containing no less than complete bibliographic information about the target content, with information about how the content can be acquired and/or a hyperlink leading to the content itself. Access to abstracts and full text is controlled by the member's online publishing system and access beyond the bibliographic information is at the member's discretion.

11. For members who do not hold copyright in the content they are registering, members must secure (non-exclusive) rights from copyright owners to deposit DOIs.

12. CrossRef only registers DOIs for Definitive Works (or Versions of Record, if not formally published) but not for Duplicative Works, as defined in the CrossRef Glossary. This means that only original scholarly material, for which there is no actual DOI at the time of submission, and no expected duplication in future, is admissible for CrossRef DOI registration. CrossRef does not permit multiple DOIs to be assigned to the same work, or closely related versions of a work, and hence does not support assignment of DOIs to Pre-prints or Post-prints of Definitive Works or to the Personal Version or a Self-archived Copy of a Definitive Work. For the same reasons, materials for which DOI duplication can be reasonably anticipated, such as an Authors Original Draft of a work being prepared for publication, are not admissible for CrossRef DOI registration.

13. Where a CrossRef member has content which is substantially Duplicative of Definitive Works, the member must comply with following requirements:

a. it must retrieve the DOIs of Definitive Works for display in such substantially Duplicative Works and must link from the
substantially Duplicative Works to the Definitive Works.

b. it may not retrieve DOIs for linking references in substantially Duplicative Works.

Rules for Organizations with primary and other, non-primary divisions or products

1. Organizations with both primary and other, non-primary divisions or products only need pay one annual membership fee for all divisions or products.

2. Organizations with both primary and other, non-primary divisions or products can have a combined retrieval process for DOIs and share them within the organization.

3. Non-primary divisions or products in an organization with a primary division or primary journals will not be allowed to retrieve DOIs unless the primary journals' metadata is deposited in the CrossRef system.