Governance

Who runs it

The registry is run by Smart Scholars, a partnership firm in Hyderabad, India, in business since 1 January 2025. It is registered as a micro enterprise (Udyam UDYAM-TS-20-0215979) and under the Telangana Shops and Establishments Act, 1988 (SEA/MED/JCL/RR/1402392/2026); both numbers can be checked at the registers.

Registered office: 304, MK Residency, Srinivasa Colony, Uppal, Hyderabad – 500039, Telangana, India.

Member of ALPSP, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers — listed in its member directory.

Who answers for it

Rahul Raj Akkali answers for the registry: its policies, its quality procedure, and how it treats registrants and readers. Write to mou@smartscholars.in; anything about a DOI, a record, a policy or the registry's conduct is answered within two working days.

Access to the registry's own systems is by named people at Smart Scholars, each with their own sign-in and a second factor.

Where it stands

Smart Scholars is not yet a DOI Registration Agency. Until the DOI Foundation appoints it, the DOIs it registers for its clients are registered at Crossref, through the client's own Crossref membership or a sponsor, and the registry holds those DOIs, their records and their full history. Names under a test prefix exist for trials only.

Held today: 928 registered DOIs under 1 prefixes, for 1 registrants, with 1,851 entries in the ledger (the registry's front page).

How its rules are made and changed

A policy changes only by a new numbered version, published on the policies page with the date it takes effect. A change that adds a duty or a fee takes effect no sooner than 90 days after it is published, and every registrant is told by e-mail on the day of publication. Earlier versions stay readable. The policies in force are version 1.1.

The technical rules, the metadata format and the DOI System Metadata specification are versioned the same way; a fault that came from a rule being wrong is put right by a new version of that rule's document, with the date it takes effect.

Every registrant treated alike

Smart Scholars also sells services to journals — audits, indexing applications, DOI and metadata repair. The registry treats every registrant alike, client or not: the same rules, the same checks before registration, the same published fee schedule with no fee that is not on it, and no record changed except at the registrant's instruction or where the metadata policy allows, with every change written into the DOI's public history.

A record's metadata is open to everyone, to read, download and reuse without asking and without a fee.

How it is paid for

Today the registry costs its registrants nothing: it is run at Smart Scholars' own cost. After appointment it is paid for by the fees in a published schedule, whose principles are fixed now: a fee per DOI registered, lower for older works; an annual fee by the registrant's size, with the smallest free of it; a test prefix free of charge; and never a fee for keeping a DOI right — updating or correcting a record, changing its address, withdrawing or restoring it, or transferring a prefix.

If we stop

No DOI is ever deleted, and no name is ever given twice. Every night the registry writes a complete, open, checksummed copy of every DOI, every record and every change in its history, in plain files that need no software of ours to read; it is published on the escrow page and committed the same night to Smart Scholars' private escrow repository, where every night's copy is kept.

Smart Scholars will lodge that copy with a third party under a continuity agreement, so that if it ever stops running the registry, the DOI Foundation and a successor can keep every DOI resolving from it. That agreement is not made yet; it will be named here when it is. A registrant that leaves keeps every DOI resolving, and its prefix moves with it or stays — never at a charge.

Watched, checked and recorded

Every public page and the registry's Handle server are read twice an hour from the web host and every five minutes from a second server, each watching the other; the results are on the status page. Every control between a name being taken and a DOI resolving, the records kept and the faults found are in the quality procedure. The keys to the DOI system and to registrants' data are kept encrypted, never shown, and replaced the same day if one is ever seen elsewhere.

Complaints

Write to mou@smartscholars.in; a complaint is answered within two working days. One the registry does not resolve within 30 days may be put to the DOI Foundation, under the Foundation's own procedures, once Smart Scholars is a Registration Agency. A person named in a record who believes it is wrong may write to the registrant that published the work, or to the registry, which passes it on and records the outcome.