FRELIP Editorial Team

By the FRELIP Editorial Team “You can read it” and “you can reuse it” are not the same thing. Copyright governs reuse by default, and Creative Commons (CC) licences are the tool that lets creators grant clear, standardized permissions in advance. This briefing offers a plain-language guide to CC licensing for educators and researchers: what the core licence elements (attribution, share-alike, non-commercial, no-derivatives) actually permit, how to choose a licence that matches your intent, and how to attribute openly licensed work correctly. We will clear up common misconceptions — including why “freely available online” does not mean “free to reuse” — and connect licensing literacy to the responsible adaptation of OER.

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Researcher Guide · Open Access Publishing open access does not have to cost you a naira. Most open-access journals in the world charge authors nothing — and a whole class of them, called diamond journals, are free to read and free to publish. This is the practical, verified list of where a Nigerian lecturer can publish without an Article Processing Charge, how to find more, how to check they are legitimate, and why — for us in particular — the free journal beats the “waiver” almost every time. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Open Access & Research Practice · Journal fee status verified against DOAJ & AJOL, August 2026 ~62% of DOAJ journals charge authors no fee 650+ African journals hosted free on AJOL ₦0 what a diamond journal costs to publish 50% the best automatic APC break most Nigerian authors get — never a full waiver What this guide covers What “APC-free” and “diamond” actually mean Why this matters more for Nigerian lecturers How to find no-fee journals in DOAJ AJOL and the “No fee” badge The list — verified APC-free journals by discipline How to check an APC-free journal is legitimate The waiver route — and why it disappoints in Nigeria How FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources What “APC-free” and “diamond” actually mean An Article Processing Charge (APC) is a fee some open-access journals ask the author — or the author’s institution or funder — to pay after a paper is accepted, so that the published article can be free for everyone to read. The reader pays nothing; the author pays instead. At the large commercial publishers, that fee commonly runs from about US$1,500 to US$3,500, and at the most prestigious titles it climbs far higher. On a Nigerian lecturer’s salary, a single APC can swallow more than a month’s pay. An APC-free journal simply does not charge that fee. The most complete form of this is diamond open access (sometimes called platinum): a journal that is free to read and free to publish, with its running costs covered by a university, a learned society, a library consortium or a grant rather than by the author. Science Europe, one of the bodies that funds and studies this model, defines diamond OA in exactly those terms — no charges to readers or authors. If you want the wider picture of how gold, green, diamond and hybrid fit together, our companion explainer on the four open-access models lays them side by side; this guide is about one thing only — the routes that cost you nothing. Here is the fact that reframes everything: publishing open access for free is the normal case, not the exception. A live count of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in August 2026 shows roughly 14,600 of its ~23,300 indexed journals — about 62% — charge no APC at all. The widely repeated idea that “open access means paying” is simply false for the majority of the field. Why this matters more for Nigerian lecturers Every researcher benefits from a free route to publication. But Nigerian academics have a specific, under-discussed reason to care, and it is worth stating plainly up front because it overturns a common assumption. Many lecturers here have been told: “You are in a developing country, so the big publishers will waive your APC.” For Nigeria, that is only half true — and the half that fails is the one that matters. The largest commercial open-access publishers reserve their automatic full (100%) waivers for low-income countries only. Nigeria is classified by the World Bank as lower-middle-income, so it does not qualify for a full waiver from them at all. What is left is, at best, a partial discount — and even that is inconsistent between publishers. Verified on their own eligibility pages in August 2026: Taylor & Francis lists Nigeria for a 50% APC discount, while Springer Nature does not list Nigeria at all (its discount tier is capped to economies with a GDP below about US$200 billion, which Nigeria exceeds). A 50% discount still leaves you paying half of a fee that can run to thousands of dollars. The single most important takeaway Do not build your publishing plan around getting a fee waived. For a Nigerian author, the dependable free route is a journal that never charged a fee in the first place — a diamond / APC-free journal. Waivers, where they exist for us at all, are usually partial and discretionary. The list below is the reliable path. How to find no-fee journals in DOAJ DOAJ is the world’s vetted whitelist of genuine open-access journals, and it is the single best tool for finding APC-free ones. It records each journal’s fee status, so you can filter for the free ones directly. The process takes two minutes. Step 1 Open the DOAJ journal search Go to doaj.org/search/journals. You are searching journals, not individual articles. Step 2 Filter out the fees In the left-hand filters, open “Journal charges” and select the option for journals without an APC. Then also exclude “other charges” — this removes journals that skip the APC but still levy submission or per-page fees. Step 3 Narrow to your field Use the Subjects facet to pick your discipline, and the language or country facets if you want an African or Nigerian title specifically. Step 4 Confirm any single journal Look a journal up directly at doaj.org/toc/<ISSN> — paste in its ISSN and read the fee panel. This is how you verify every entry in the list below for yourself. “No APC” does not always mean “free” This is the trap that catches careful researchers. A journal can advertise “no APC” and still charge a submission fee or a per-page charge. DOAJ records those separately as “other charges,” which is why Step 2 tells you to exclude both. Before you submit anywhere, open the journal’s own author guidelines and read the fees section in full.

By the FRELIP Editorial Team Open access is incomplete if “accessible” means only “free of charge.” Real accessibility also means usable on a slow connection, on a basic device, and by readers with disabilities. This briefing makes the case for offline-first and accessible scholarship: lightweight pages that load on intermittent networks, formats that work without constant connectivity, and adherence to accessibility standards so that screen-reader users and others are not left behind. We will connect these principles to FRELIP’s design choices and explain why treating bandwidth, device, and disability constraints as first-class concerns — not afterthoughts — is essential to genuinely open knowledge.

By the FRELIP Editorial Team Plan S, advanced by the cOAlition S group of research funders, pushes for immediate open access to publicly funded research — a goal few would dispute in principle. But its mechanics raise hard questions for researchers in regions with little funder leverage. This briefing looks at Plan S from an African vantage point: what the policy actually requires, how its emphasis on certain compliance routes interacts with APC-based publishing, and why African scholars have asked that global open access policy be shaped with the Global South rather than merely applied to it. We will separate the policy’s aims from its unintended consequences and consider what equitable implementation could look like.

By the FRELIP Editorial Team An institutional repository is a university’s own digital archive — the place it preserves and openly shares the theses, articles, and datasets its community produces. This briefing examines the state of institutional repositories in Nigerian universities: what they make possible, the common obstacles of funding, staffing, and sustained maintenance, and why a repository is only as valuable as the metadata and harvesting standards that make its contents findable beyond the campus. We will discuss how OAI-PMH exposes repository records to aggregators, the role of green open access self-archiving, and how FRELIP’s discovery layer helps surface the scholarship these repositories work to preserve.

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Student Guide · Research Skills The papers you need for an essay or thesis are almost all out there — free, peer-reviewed and legal to read — if you know where to look instead of paying a paywall or falling for a pirate site. This guide shows you where to find scholarly articles and academic sources online, how to tell a credible source from a weak one, and how to reach the full text without spending a naira. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Research Skills · Reviewed against primary database documentation, 2026 Free the best scholarly databases cost nothing Peer-reviewed vetted by independent experts Open access millions of papers free to read legally No piracy you never need sci-hub to do this What this guide covers What counts as a good academic source How to tell if a source is peer-reviewed Where to find scholarly articles free African & Nigerian sources specifically How to reach the full text — legally How to search so you actually find things Common mistakes students make How FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources What counts as a good academic source Before you can find good sources, you need to know what “good” means. Not everything online carries equal weight in academic writing, and markers can tell the difference instantly. The gold standard is the scholarly, peer-reviewed source — a journal article, conference paper or academic book written by researchers, citing its own evidence, and checked by other experts before publication. Below that sit credible professional and official sources: government statistics, reports from bodies like the World Health Organization, and reputable institutional publications. At the bottom, and usually not citable for a serious argument, are blogs, general websites, and unattributed content. A quick way to weigh any source is to ask five questions — currency (is it recent enough for your topic?), relevance (does it actually address your question?), authority (who wrote it, and what are their credentials?), accuracy (is it evidence-based and referenced?), and purpose (is it informing, or selling/persuading?). This is often taught as the CRAAP test, and it works on anything from a journal article to a random PDF you found through a search engine. How to tell if a source is peer-reviewed Peer review is the quality-control system of scholarship: before an article is published, the journal sends it to independent experts in the field who scrutinise the methods, evidence and conclusions and recommend acceptance, revision or rejection. An article that has passed peer review has cleared a bar that a blog post or preprint has not. Check 1 Look at the journal, not just the article Find the journal’s website and read its “About” or “For Authors” page. If it describes a peer-review process, articles in it are peer-reviewed. Journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have been vetted for exactly this. Check 2 Use the database’s filter Many databases let you tick a “peer-reviewed” or “scholarly journals” box to limit results. It is the fastest filter you have. Check 3 Beware preprints A preprint (on a server like arXiv or SSRN) is a paper shared before peer review. Useful and current, but not yet vetted — flag it as a preprint if you cite it, and look for the published version. Watch for predatory journals Some journals will publish anything for a fee, with little or no real peer review. These “predatory” journals look legitimate but are not. Cross-check any unfamiliar journal against DOAJ before trusting it — our companion guide on spotting predatory journals shows you how. Where to find scholarly articles free You do not need an expensive university subscription to find peer-reviewed research. These databases and search engines are free to use and index tens of millions of scholarly works, a large share of them full-text open access. Where What it is Best for Google Scholar A free search engine for scholarly literature across most disciplines and publishers. A fast first sweep of any topic; follow “All versions” to find a free copy. DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals — a curated index of vetted, fully open-access journals. Confirming a journal is legitimate and finding free peer-reviewed articles. CORE One of the largest aggregators of open-access research papers worldwide. Finding the free full text of a paper. BASE Bielefeld Academic Search Engine — indexes hundreds of millions of documents from repositories globally. Deep searches, including grey literature and theses. Semantic Scholar A free, AI-assisted research tool from the Allen Institute for AI. Following citations and finding related work. OpenAlex A free, open index of the world’s scholarly works, authors and institutions. Big-picture searching and mapping a field. PubMed The US National Library of Medicine’s free index of biomedical literature; PubMed Central holds free full text. Medicine, nursing, public health, life sciences. ERIC A free US-government index of education research. Education and teaching topics. Start broad, then confirm free access A good routine: search your topic in Google Scholar to see the landscape, then when you find a paper you want, paste its title into CORE or BASE, or use the Unpaywall button (below), to reach a legal free copy. Confirm the journal in DOAJ if you are unsure it is credible. African & Nigerian sources specifically International databases under-represent African scholarship, so for Nigerian and African topics you should search closer to home as well. These platforms carry research that Google Scholar may miss. Africa-wide AJOL — African Journals OnLine The largest online collection of African-published, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, covering many Nigerian titles. Much of it is free to read. Preprints AfricArXiv An open preprint repository for African research — useful for the newest work, remembering it is pre-peer-review. Your own library University repositories & TETFund outputs Many Nigerian universities host institutional repositories of theses and staff publications. Check your institution’s library portal — and FRELIP, which indexes open African scholarship in one place. How to reach the full text — legally

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Student Guide · Research Skills Every essay, project and thesis you submit rests on other people’s work — and citing that work correctly is what separates scholarship from plagiarism. This guide shows you how to cite sources and reference properly: what the terms mean, how the main styles differ, and exactly how to cite a journal article, a book and a website, with worked examples. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Research Skills · Reviewed against APA, MLA and Chicago primary style guidance, 2026 2 parts every citation = in-text + reference list APA 7 the current APA edition (2019–) Author-date the most common in-text system Free tools to manage it all — no fees What this guide covers Why citing sources matters Citation, reference, bibliography — the terms The main referencing styles, compared The anatomy of a citation How to cite a journal article (worked examples) How to cite books, chapters & websites Tools that do the formatting for you Common mistakes students make How FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources Why citing sources matters Referencing is not a bureaucratic hoop your lecturer invented to punish you. It does three real jobs, and understanding them makes every other rule easier to follow. It gives credit and avoids plagiarism. When you use someone else’s idea, data, argument or exact words, citing them acknowledges the debt. Failing to do so — even accidentally, even from a website — is plagiarism, an academic-integrity offence that can cost you marks, a module, or in serious cases your place on a programme. A citation is your defence: it shows precisely where your material ends and someone else’s begins. It lets a reader verify your claims. A reference is a set of directions. It should carry enough detail — author, year, title, where it was published — that anyone can trace the exact source you used and check that it says what you say it says. That traceability is the whole basis of trust in academic writing. It shows the reader you have done the reading. A well-referenced essay signals that your argument sits inside a wider conversation. Markers reward this: it demonstrates research, not just opinion. In short, citing sources protects you, informs your reader, and strengthens your grade all at once. Citation, reference, bibliography — the terms Students trip over these three words constantly, often because different lecturers use them loosely. Here is the clean distinction most style guides work with. Term What it is Where it lives In-text citation The short marker inside your sentence pointing to a source — e.g. (Okafor, 2021) or a superscript number. In the body of your writing, right where you use the source. Reference The full description of one source — author, year, title, publication details — enough to find it. In the list at the end. Reference list The list of only the sources you actually cited in the text. End of the document (APA, MLA call it “References” / “Works Cited”). Bibliography A list of everything you consulted, whether or not you cited it directly. End of the document — used by some styles (e.g. Chicago) and some assignments. The key rule: every in-text citation must have a matching entry in your reference list, and every entry must have been cited in the text. The two halves are a pair. Markers check this correspondence, and citation software enforces it automatically. The main referencing styles, compared A “referencing style” is simply an agreed set of rules for how you format those citations and references. Different disciplines favour different styles, so the first thing to do for any assignment is find out which style your department requires — check the assignment brief or module handbook, and use that one consistently throughout. Never mix styles in one document. Style In-text system Typically used in APA (7th ed.) Author–date: (Author, Year) Psychology, education, social & health sciences, nursing, business MLA (9th ed.) Author–page: (Author 23) Literature, languages, arts & humanities Chicago (notes) Footnotes/endnotes + bibliography History, some humanities Harvard Author–date (Author, Year) A family of author–date styles common in UK & Nigerian universities; exact format varies by institution Vancouver Numbered: [1] in order of appearance Medicine, biomedical & many hard sciences IEEE Numbered: [1] in square brackets Engineering, computing “Harvard” is not one fixed standard Unlike APA or MLA — which are published by a single body with an official manual — “Harvard referencing” is a general author–date approach with no single governing authority. That is why one university’s Harvard guide can differ from another’s in punctuation and order. If your department says “use Harvard,” follow your institution’s own Harvard guide, not a random one online. The anatomy of a citation Whatever the style, a citation almost always has two connected parts. Get this mental model and the specific rules become details rather than mysteries. Part 1 The in-text citation A brief pointer where you use the source. In author–date styles it carries the author’s surname and the year — (Adeyemi, 2020) — and a page number for a direct quotation — (Adeyemi, 2020, p. 14). In numeric styles it is just a number that matches the reference list. Part 2 The reference-list entry The full record at the end, giving every detail needed to locate the source: who wrote it, when, what it is called, and where it appeared (journal, publisher, or URL/DOI). Author–date styles let you cite in two voices. A parenthetical citation puts everything in brackets: Open access widens readership in low-income regions (Nwosu, 2022). A narrative citation weaves the author into your sentence: Nwosu (2022) found that open access widens readership in low-income regions. Use narrative citations when the author matters to your point, parenthetical when the finding matters more than who said it. How to cite a journal article (worked examples) The journal article is the source students cite most and get wrong most, so here it is in full, in the two

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Researcher Guide · Open Access “Open access” is not one thing. It is a family of models — gold, green, diamond and hybrid — and they differ in who pays, where your paper lives, and what you are allowed to reuse. Getting the difference right is the difference between publishing for free and being asked for a fee larger than a Nigerian lecturer’s monthly salary. Here is each model, plainly, with the routes that cost an African researcher nothing. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Open Access & Research Practice · Checked against the Budapest Open Access Initiative, DOAJ, UNESCO & the OA Diamond Journals Study, 2026 4 core models: gold · green · diamond · hybrid ~2 in 3 DOAJ journals charge authors no fee ₦0 what green & diamond cost the author $0–$12k+ the range of article fees across models What this guide covers What “open access” actually means The four models at a glance Gold, green, diamond & hybrid — one by one Bronze, and what is not open access What it really costs — APCs & waivers Choosing your route as a Nigerian researcher Identifiers, discovery & how FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources What “open access” actually means Open access (OA) means research that is free to read online, with no subscription and no paywall between the reader and the work. The founding definition comes from the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002, which described OA as literature made “freely available on the public internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts.” That is the goal every model below is trying to reach — they simply take different roads to it, and split the cost differently along the way. Two distinctions unlock everything that follows. The first is about rights. Scholars separate gratis OA — free to read, but with normal copyright still restricting reuse — from libre OA — free to read and carrying an open licence (usually a Creative Commons licence such as CC BY) that also permits reuse, translation and text-mining. Libre is the fuller form of open access. The second distinction is about where the open copy lives, and it gives us the two original “roads” named by cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad: the gold road, where the journal itself publishes the article openly, and the green road, where the author deposits a copy in a repository. Everything marketers now call “gold, green, diamond, hybrid” is a refinement of those two ideas plus one question: who pays, and how much? The four models at a glance Before the detail, here is the whole landscape on one screen. Read it as: where is the open copy, who pays, and what does it cost me as the author? Model Where the open copy lives Who pays Cost to you, the author Gold The journal — final published version, open immediately Usually the author/their funder, via an APC Often an APC (but not always — see diamond) Green A repository — your own accepted manuscript No one charges the author Free. The journal may still be paywalled Diamond The journal — final version, open immediately An institution, society or grant Free to read and free to publish Hybrid A subscription journal, one article at a time The author, on top of the journal’s subscriptions An APC — usually the most expensive route The single most useful thing to remember The colour is not the price. “Gold” does not mean “you pay” and “green” does not mean “second best.” Gold journals can be free (that is diamond); green costs the author nothing at all. The fee — the Article Processing Charge, or APC — is a funding choice layered on top, not a property of the colour itself. Gold, green, diamond & hybrid — one by one Gold open access In the gold model, the journal makes the final, peer-reviewed, published version of your article free to everyone, immediately, on its own website — normally under a Creative Commons licence. This is the version of record: the polished, typeset, citable article. Fully open-access journals are indexed and vetted in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which lists over 20,000 journals from more than 130 countries and is the standard whitelist for checking that a gold journal is genuine. The catch some researchers hit is cost: many well-known gold journals fund themselves by charging the author an APC. Green open access Green OA is self-archiving. You publish in whatever journal you like — including a subscription one — and separately deposit a copy of your work in an open repository: your university’s institutional repository, or a subject repository or preprint server. The version you are usually allowed to post is the accepted manuscript (the peer-reviewed text, before the publisher’s typesetting), and publishers often impose an embargo — a delay of 6 to 24 months before the repository copy can go live. Green costs the author nothing, and every publisher’s specific rules are searchable in Sherpa Romeo, the standard database of journal self-archiving policies. Green is the route almost no one uses — and almost everyone can If your paper is already published behind a paywall, you may still be legally allowed to put the accepted manuscript in your university repository right now. Check the journal in Sherpa Romeo, confirm the embargo, and deposit. It is the cheapest open-access route in existence: it costs nothing but ten minutes. Diamond (or platinum) open access Diamond OA is gold’s more generous sibling: the journal is free to read and free to publish — no APC at all. The running costs are covered by a university, a learned society, a library consortium or a government, rather than by the author. This model quietly dominates the real world of open access: the 2021 OA Diamond Journals Study, commissioned by cOAlition S and Science Europe, estimated 17,000–29,000 such journals worldwide, and they are

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Researcher Guide · Open Access One number is supposed to sum up a researcher’s whole career — how much they publish and how much it gets cited. That number is the h-index. Here is exactly what it means, how to work yours out, why three databases will give you three different answers, and why no committee should judge you by it alone. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Open Access & Research Practice · Reviewed against Hirsch (2005), DORA & the Leiden Manifesto, 2026 1 number productivity + impact combined 3 values Scopus, Web of Science & Google Scholar differ Free Google Scholar shows yours 2005 introduced by physicist J. Hirsch What this guide covers What the h-index is — and why it matters How to calculate it (worked example) Where to find yours — and why the numbers differ What the h-index can’t tell you The African researcher’s context Using it responsibly & how FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources What the h-index is — and why it matters The h-index is a single number that tries to capture two things at once: how much a researcher has published, and how often that work is cited. It was proposed in 2005 by the physicist Jorge E. Hirsch (hence its other name, the Hirsch index), and it has since become one of the most widely quoted figures in academic careers — appearing in CVs, grant reviews, and promotion files. The definition is precise: The h-index, defined A researcher has an h-index of h if h of their papers have each been cited at least h times — and their remaining papers have no more than h citations each. So an h-index of 20 means: 20 papers, each cited 20 or more times. The appeal is that it resists two kinds of distortion. A researcher can’t inflate it with one wildly-cited paper (that lifts the count by only one), and they can’t inflate it by publishing dozens of papers nobody cites (those never reach the threshold). It rewards sustained, cited output — which is exactly why evaluators reached for it. Understanding it matters because, fairly or not, this number will be read as shorthand for your standing as a researcher. How to calculate it (worked example) To find an h-index by hand, list every paper’s citation count from highest to lowest, then walk down the list until the citation count drops below the paper’s position number. The last position where citations still meet or beat the rank is the h-index. Take a researcher with seven papers cited 10, 8, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 times: 10#1 · 10≥1 ✓ 8#2 · 8≥2 ✓ 5#3 · 5≥3 ✓ 4#4 · 4≥4 ✓ 3#5 · 3<5 ✗ 2#6 · stop 1#7 · stop The cut-off falls at position 4: four papers have at least 4 citations each, but there is no fifth paper with at least 5. h-index = 4. You will almost never need to do this manually — the databases compute it for you (see next section). But doing it once makes the number concrete, and shows why adding a brand-new paper, or picking up a few more citations on your lower-ranked work, is what actually nudges an h-index upward. Where to find yours — and why the numbers differ Three major databases each calculate an h-index — and they will give you three different numbers. This is not an error. Each database only counts the publications and citations it indexes, and their coverage differs enormously. Source Access Coverage & typical h-index Google Scholar Free — public profile Broadest net (journals, conferences, preprints, theses, repositories, and self-citations) → usually the highest h-index. Also shows the i10-index. Scopus (Elsevier) Subscription Curated journal set → intermediate value. Web of Science (Clarivate) Subscription Most selective coverage → usually the lowest h-index. Studies comparing the three find Google Scholar’s h-index runs, on average, roughly 1.4× a researcher’s Web of Science value, with Scopus a little above Web of Science — though the exact ratio varies by person and field, so treat those as tendencies, not constants. The practical upshot: always state which database an h-index came from. An “h-index of 12” is meaningless without knowing whether it is a (generous) Google Scholar figure or a (conservative) Web of Science one. The free route: a Google Scholar Profile You can see — and show — your own h-index for free by creating a Google Scholar Profile. It displays your h-index and your i10-index (the number of your publications with at least 10 citations each, a Google-Scholar-only metric), and updates automatically as citations accrue. For researchers without a Scopus or Web of Science subscription, this is the accessible option. What the h-index can’t tell you The h-index is useful, but a single number hides a great deal. Every one of these limitations is well established — and every committee member should know them. Limitation What it means for you It only ever rises The h-index never decreases, even if a researcher stops publishing. It measures accumulated standing, not current activity. It is field-dependent Citation cultures differ hugely — biomedicine cites far more than mathematics. An h-index of 15 can be exceptional in one field and average in another. Never compare across disciplines. It favours long careers Because it can only grow, senior researchers almost always out-score early-career ones. It penalises people with less “academic age.” It ignores your role It counts a paper the same whether you were sole author or fifteenth of twenty. Author position and contribution vanish. It can be gamed Excessive self-citation can inflate it, so the raw number isn’t tamper-proof. It flattens your best work Once a paper passes the h threshold, extra citations on it don’t help. A landmark 2,000-citation paper counts the same as one just over the line. Two variants try to patch specific gaps. The m-quotient (Hirsch’s own idea) divides the h-index by the number of years since your

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Researcher Guide · Open Access A web link can die. A DOI does not. It is the string of characters that keeps a paper, a dataset or a thesis findable for good — no matter how often the website behind it moves. Here is what a DOI is, how you get one (including the free routes for African research), and why journals now expect it. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Open Access & Research Practice · Reviewed against DOI Foundation, Crossref & DataCite documentation, 2026 10. every DOI begins with this prefix ~275M DOIs registered worldwide ₦0 free DOI routes for Nigerian research 1 link that never suffers link rot What this guide covers What a DOI is — and why it matters What a DOI looks like How you actually get a DOI DOI vs a plain URL: the link-rot problem The cost barrier — and the free routes for Africa DOIs, ORCID & how FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources What a DOI is — and why it matters A DOI — Digital Object Identifier — is a unique, persistent identifier for a research object: a journal article, a dataset, a book chapter, a thesis, a preprint. Once assigned, it never changes, and it always points to wherever that object currently lives online. The DOI Foundation, which governs the system, is careful to say a DOI can identify “any object — physical, digital or abstract,” so although the name says “digital,” the idea is broader: a permanent name tag for a piece of scholarship. The value is easiest to see through its opposite. You have almost certainly clicked a citation’s web link and hit a 404 — page not found. Journals redesign their sites, repositories migrate servers, universities restructure their domains, and the URL you cited last year quietly dies. This is called link rot, and it silently corrodes the scholarly record. A DOI is the cure: the identifier stays constant while the publisher updates the address behind it. Cite the DOI, and your reader still reaches the paper a decade later. Technically, a DOI resolves through the Handle System. When you open https://doi.org/ followed by a DOI, the doi.org proxy looks up the current registered location and forwards you there. The persistence comes from two things working together: the technical resolution service, and a social commitment — the Registration Agencies and their members are obliged to keep the target link current. At the scale of scholarship this now matters enormously: the DOI Foundation reports roughly 275 million DOIs assigned, across more than 155,000 prefixes, resolving about a billion times a month. What a DOI looks like Every DOI has the same two-part shape: a prefix and a suffix, separated by a forward slash. The prefix always starts with 10. and identifies the organisation that registered it; the suffix is chosen by that organisation to identify the specific object. https://doi.org/10.1000/182prefix — the registrant · suffix — the specific object · (this is the DOI Handbook’s own example) A few practical rules follow from this. Always cite the DOI in its full web-link form — https://doi.org/10.xxxx/yyyy — not the old doi: or dx.doi.org styles. APA 7 makes this explicit: standardise every DOI to the https://doi.org/ form, however the source displayed it. Written that way, a DOI is both a citation and a working, permanent hyperlink. Try it yourself Paste any DOI after https://doi.org/ in your browser’s address bar and press enter. It will resolve to the publisher’s current page for that work. That single behaviour — a link that follows the content wherever it goes — is the whole point of the system. How you actually get a DOI Here is the most common point of confusion: you do not get a DOI from doi.org. The DOI Foundation only runs the system. DOIs are issued by Registration Agencies (RAs) — and which one applies depends on what you are identifying. Route 1 — most researchers Your publisher assigns it via Crossref When a journal accepts your article, the publisher (a Crossref member) registers a DOI for it at publication. You do nothing — it appears on the published version. Crossref is the RA for scholarly literature, with 24,000+ member organisations. Route 2 — data, theses, preprints A repository assigns it via DataCite For a dataset, thesis, report or preprint, you deposit it in a repository that is a DataCite member (many university repositories are). The repository mints the DOI as part of the deposit. Route 3 — do it yourself, free Self-deposit in Zenodo No institutional repository? Upload your work to Zenodo (run by CERN). It registers a DataCite DOI for every deposit at no cost — the simplest way for an individual African researcher to mint a citable DOI for a preprint, dataset or report. Behind every one of these routes, the RA member registers metadata alongside the DOI — title, authors, publication date, and more. Crossref and DataCite then make that metadata openly queryable through public APIs (REST, OAI-PMH and others), which is what powers citation linking, indexing and discovery across the whole research ecosystem. DOI vs a plain URL: the link-rot problem Why not just cite the journal’s web address? Because a URL and a DOI are fundamentally different kinds of thing. A plain URL A DOI Persistence Breaks when the site moves or restructures (link rot) Stays constant; the registrant keeps the target updated Metadata None attached — just an address Carries registered, queryable metadata (authors, date, title) Managed? No one is obliged to keep it working An RA member is obliged to maintain resolution Citation-ready Discouraged by most citation styles Required by APA 7 and expected by journals & indexes That is the core value proposition in one line: a URL is where something is right now; a DOI is what something is, forever. For a researcher whose work must remain citable and discoverable years after publication — and whose citations must still