Best Practice if a Consortium Organization Leaves

There are certain scenarios where a Consortium Organization will leave a Consortium. In these cases, the Consortium Lead should consider the following:

The consortium agreement

“Shall a Consortium Organization discontinue the use of the DOI Registration Service, the Consortium Lead must make reasonable efforts to ensure that each Identifier assigned to the Consortium Organization's Content continuously resolves to a response page (a "Landing Page").”

Therefore, if a Consortium Organization terminates their membership of a DataCite Consortium, the DOIs that have been registered by the Consortium Organization should continue to be managed under the consortium.

In practical terms, the best way to manage this is:

• Transfer the repository account(s) of the departing consortium organization to another consortium organization under the consortium (this can be the consortium organization belonging to the consortium lead, or another, as agreed).
• Update the repository to inactive.
• Delete the old consortium organization account (to avoid paying the consortium organization fee for the following year).

This will ensure there is a record of the repository and it can be re-activated if needed. There will be no fees associated with archiving the repository.

Reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions.