Title ownership dispute resolution

We allow members to freely register DOI records for titles that do not yet exist in our system. Term 2c of our membership terms states:

Rights to Content. The Member will not deposit or register Metadata for any Content for which the Member does not have legal rights to do so.

This means that either the journal owner or their appointed publisher can register DOI records for a title.

When the first submission for a title is processed, a title record is added to our database. This title record ties the title to the prefix belonging to the first registrant and they become the “owning member”. From this point, new DOIs for that title can only be created on the owning member prefix. If another member wishes to register DOIs belonging to that title on their own prefix, they can’t do this unless we move ownership of the title in our system to them. Only one member can be the owning member for a title at any given time.

Title ownership transfers in our system are really common and usually straighforward, and we follow our standard title ownership transfer process.. But very occasionally there isn’t agreement between the two members about who should be registering DOIs going forward, and the member who wants to take on ownership of the title in our system becomes a “disputing member”. In these very rare cases, we follow this process:

1. The disputing member will notify us of the title dispute - an email to Support is sufficient
2. We’ll contact the owning member informing them of the title dispute.
3. If the owning member agrees that their ownership is incorrect or if they do not respond within 10 working days, we will re-assign title and record ownership to the disputing member, who then becomes the new owning member.
4. If the owning member challenges the claim, the two parties must resolve the issue together within 90 days. We will move title ownership under instruction from the owning member, or under direction from legal authority.
5. If the dispute is not resolved within 90 days, the disputing member can request that we remove the ability for any party to register further content for the publication under dispute until this is resolved.
6. This remains the case until we receive notice of a legal conclusion.