DRI Membership Terms

These terms govern membership of DRI, the Digital Research Identifier service, operated by Everedge Group (United Arab Emirates) (“DRI”, “we”). A member is the organization that applies — a journal, a university or research institution, a publisher, or another responsible organization. An administrator is a person the member has authorized to act for it in the DRI portal. By ticking the attestation on the application form, the applicant confirms they are authorized to bind the member to these terms and to the Persistence Policy.

1. Joining

Applications are reviewed by a person. We check the identity evidence supplied (ISSN, ROR, ISBN prefix, other identifiers, the organization's website and country) and may ask for more, and we may decline an application without giving a reason. Approval creates a sandbox account whose identifiers are for testing only: they are not public registry records, carry no persistence commitment, and are never billed. A journal that is published by a parent organization must say so; whether it may hold a membership of its own is decided at review.

2. Fees

• Membership: USD 500 per year. The first term begins when the first membership invoice settles, at which point the account becomes live and receives its permanent authority number. Each renewal buys the next twelve-month term; a renewal invoice is issued about 45 days before the current term ends.
• Identifiers: USD 1 per live identifier, charged when it is minted — whether by an administrator, by confirming a detected publication, or automatically under a permission you granted — and rolled into a usage invoice periodically (about quarterly, or sooner once USD 50 has accrued). Sandbox identifiers are free.
• Prices exclude VAT and sales taxes; any applicable tax is the member's responsibility unless stated on the invoice. Every invoice names the selling entity and can carry your tax identifier, billing address and purchase-order number.
• Payment is by card, bank transfer, or the gateways offered on the billing page. A card is stored for automatic renewal only if you tick the card-on-file mandate when paying; you can turn it off at any time from Billing.

3. What happens if you stop paying

This is the part members most often assume the worst about, so it is stated plainly.

• A membership term that ends unpaid enters a 30-day grace period. You are reminded; nothing else changes.
• After grace, minting new identifiers is frozen. Every identifier already issued keeps resolving, permanently, and its public metadata stays available. Your authority number is reserved for you and is never reassigned.
• Paying the outstanding invoice restores minting immediately. A usage invoice left unpaid for 30 days past its due date has the same effect, and the same remedy.

4. Identifiers and the persistence commitment

A DRI, once issued to a work, is never deleted and never reassigned to a different work. A withdrawn work resolves to a permanent tombstone page rather than disappearing; a retracted work keeps resolving and is marked retracted. You are responsible for keeping each identifier's target address pointing at the same work — you may move it, but not repoint it at something else. The full commitment, including the nightly open-format escrow that lets a successor steward reconstitute the registry, is the Persistence Policy, which forms part of these terms.

5. Public metadata

Bibliographic metadata for every live identifier you register — title, authors, publication date, your organization, and the address it resolves to — is always publicly resolvable and harvestable, by anyone, without an account, through the resolver, the public API and OAI-PMH. This is a condition of membership: it is what makes a registered identifier useful to a reader and persistent after you are gone. It does not stop if you withdraw an optional permission, if your membership lapses, or if you leave. Withdrawing a work does not remove its record: its identifier resolves to a permanent tombstone page showing its title and your organization, and its metadata stays readable through the resolver and the public API, marked withdrawn (OAI-PMH reports it as deleted). Only sandbox identifiers are kept out of the public API, OAI-PMH and the sitemap. You grant DRI a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide licence to store, publish and distribute that metadata for the purpose of operating a persistent-identifier registry, including by escrow to a successor steward.

6. Optional permissions

Beyond membership, you may grant DRI specific, withdrawable permissions from the application form or the portal. Each is described in its own words there; in summary: monitor lets DRI read your public feeds, sitemaps and pages to notice new publications; publish lists your organization on a public directory page and in the sitemap; automatic registration lets a source you mark as trusted mint identifiers — each of them billed — without a confirmation step, up to a daily cap; automatic updates lets such a source correct a record's metadata or address from what your own page declares, and withdraw a record whose page has gone — but only after a notice period (14 days by default) during which a link in the notice cancels it, and never on a page DRI has not itself found gone. Withdrawing a permission takes effect at once; identifiers already minted under it persist.

7. Your responsibilities

• You have the right to register the works you register, and the metadata you supply or let DRI read is accurate to the best of your knowledge.
• Your administrators are people authorized to act for you. You keep the list current from the portal and tell us at once if an account is compromised.
• You use DRI for scholarly and research outputs only, and not to register material you do not publish or have no right to describe.

8. Suspension and leaving

We may suspend a membership for breach of these terms, misuse, or a credible report that identifiers were registered without the right to do so. Suspension stops minting and monitoring; it does not, and cannot, stop identifiers resolving. You may leave at any time by telling us; nothing you registered is removed, because permanence is the point of the service.

9. Refunds

Fees are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise or we agree in writing. A refunded first-year membership returns the account to sandbox, with its live identifiers continuing to resolve.

10. Service and liability

We operate DRI with care and publish how it works, but except for the Persistence Policy it is provided as is, without warranty of uninterrupted availability. To the extent the law allows, our total liability to a member for any claim arising from the service is limited to the membership fees that member paid in the twelve months before the claim, and neither party is liable for indirect or consequential loss.

11. Personal data

How we handle the personal data of administrators, applicants and the authors named in metadata is set out in the Privacy Policy. A data-processing agreement is available to members that need one.

12. Changes to these terms

These terms are versioned. Your application records the version you accepted, when, and by whom; we will give members at least 30 days' notice of a material change, and continuing to mint after that date is acceptance of the new version. Changes never weaken the Persistence Policy for identifiers already issued.

13. Governing law and contact

These terms are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates, and the courts of the United Arab Emirates have jurisdiction, unless the law of the member's country grants it protections that cannot be waived. Questions: ops@dri-id.everedgegroup.com.