Has anyone compared pricing models of crossref and datacite? Also can anyone share their experience using either with OJS? How do you decide between the two?
I compared the pricing of mEdra, Datacite and Crossref in spring 2016.
Back then Datacite was clearly the most expensive. It is not a solution for a single journal, but a larger organisation with the need for hunders of DOIs per year. You need to be a member of Datacite and in 2016 that was around 7000 euros per year (I think). I think that they have changed their pricing, but you need to make sure that you the right type of organisation that can join in, I am the wrong person to answer that. Also, you should find out if there is a Datacite member that could provide you the service (https://www.datacite.org/members.html). I know that for example in Estonia they have a Datacite membership that national journals can use (http://datacite.ut.ee/en/datacite_estonia.php).
Crossref will cost you around 275 dollars per year + 1 dollar for each registered DOI. For a typical journal that would probably mean around 300 dollars per year. They also make deals with publishers with multiple journals. We chose Crossref because they offered us a great deal, PKP is working with them closely so support in OJS will probably be good in the future and they also offer a lot more services than only DOIs (of course for extra cost).
If you only have one journal and do not have the need for other Crossref services, then the cheapest solution is most likely mEdra. They have a price bracket that is based to the amount of DOIs you register yearly. With the price of 180 euros per year, you get 30 DOIs mEDRA - Public Area - New Users - Terms and Conditions. They also have a 150 euro fee for new clients that you pay once. The thing with mEdra I was curious about is that if you want to apply DOIs for old articles, which could mean something like 200 DOIs, then with Crossref you would pay 0.15 dollars per DOI but in mEdra it would be very expensive, at least according to the bracket they provide. It could be that you could negotiate the fee for backfiles. Regarding OJS3, I am not sure if the mEdra plugin supports OJS3 (@bozana?).
As I said above, this is what I found out back in 2016. You should just contact all three and see what they have to offer you.
1 Like
All 3 (Crossref, DataCite, mEDRA) are supported in OJS…
Thank you for your detailed inputs. Very helpful. When I reached out to Datacite they referred to us to Crossref since they don’t work with publishers. Here is the reply from DataCite
DataCite works primarily with the scholarly research community to assign DOIs to research content (data, images, gray literature) so that these materials can be shared, cited, managed, discovered, connected to journal articles, etc. Our services are specifically tailored to support these type of materials. Crossref https://www.crossref.org/membership/ , on the other hand, works primarily with the publishing community to assign DOIs to articles. We do work very closely with Crossref to integrate our services – for example if a journal article points to a DataCite dataset we can connect those two
Our annual volumes are typically around 300-400 articles. In that case Crossref looks the most reasonable (mEDRA’s cost is also very high). Crossref didn’t offer us any discount and the fee would be as per your note and their website. How did you manage to get a good deal? Are your volumes super high?
Thanks!
No, on the contrary we have several smaller journals. We do not have any discount on the fees as such, just that not every individual journal has to pay the annual fee separately. We still pay the usual 1 dollar per DOI as everyone else, but for us mEDRA would be a lot more expensive. As I said, I think that mEDRA is a good solution for a single small journal.
Alright. Got your point. I agree mEDRA is a good solution when the yearly DOI’s to be assigned is less than 75. Anything above that makes it more expensive than Crossref.
Thanks again!