That is very interesting, Gregor. Apparently it is up to the registration agency on how much they charge (and not the central DOI). There are currently 8 agencies for different areas with the German TIB issuing DOI prefixes for "registration of scientific primary and secondary data" at the cost of 250€ per prefix (which allows you to create as many DOIs as you like).
http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/registration_agencies.html#8.2 http://www.doi.org/registration_agencies.html
It would also be possible to setup a new registration agency for biodiversity data if we feel this is more suited to our needs. There are several costs associated with this though, an annual membership fee ($35.000), a "franchise fee" for each newly registered name ($0.04/ doi) and a maintenance fee ($0.005/doi). So this is clearly much more expensive and would be around 9 million dollars each year for 200 million occurrence records in GBIF. http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/registration_agencies.html#8.8
So I guess this is what was investigated before and which is far too expensive. But it should be worth consulting the TIB registry, 250€ per publisher doesnt sound bad at all.
Markus
PS: I am expressing my personal thoughts in this conversation and not GBIFs official policy.
On Nov 25, 2008, at 6:26, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
I previously concurred with arguments against DOI on the basis of cost. However, is this correct?
http://www.tib-hannover.de/en/the-tib/doi-registration-agency/ states a yearly fee of 250 EUR for the publisher, not a per-object fee. That is considerably less than the Total Cost of Ownership of running custom-designed LSID software. DOI is well established and many people already know that it can be looked up on the web ...
Gregor
Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
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