Terms of use

Definitions

Term	Meaning
ORI, we, us	The ORI registry and its operator, Oxton Education.
Service	The website, the dashboard, the public and write APIs, OAI-PMH, the connectors, the optional modules and any related service offered under the ORI name.
Organization	A publisher, university, research institute or scholarly society approved to participate in ORI.
Journal	A journal of an organization that registers records in ORI.
Participant	An organization and its journals, together.
User	A natural person with an ORI account, acting for a participant or for the ORI team.
Credential	A secret issued in the dashboard that lets a system use the write API for one journal.
Record	The metadata of a publication registered in ORI, with its identifier, history and any deposited files.
Identifier	An ORI code, in the form ORI:institution/year.number (e.g. ORI:10001/2026.0001), or in the earlier form ORI- followed by twelve characters, assigned to one record.
Content	Metadata, files, texts and any other material sent to ORI by a participant or user.
Policies	The ORI policies published on this website (registration, persistence, metadata updates, retractions and corrections, security, privacy), which are part of these terms.

Acceptance and eligibility

1. Using the service requires accepting these terms and the policies. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
2. Users must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into contracts.
3. A person who accepts these terms for an organization declares that they have the authority to bind it; the organization is responsible for the acts of the people it authorizes.
4. Reading public record pages, the public API and OAI-PMH does not require an account, but is also subject to these terms, in particular the rules of acceptable use.

The service

1. ORI issues persistent institutional identifiers and keeps public records with open metadata for publications of participating journals, with the features described on this website.
2. ORI is not a DOI registration agency, is not Crossref and is not an internationally accredited identifier. An ORI does not replace a DOI where a DOI is required.
3. ORI validates the format and consistency of metadata but does not review, endorse, certify or guarantee the scientific content, quality, originality, ethics or peer review of any publication.
4. We may change, add, suspend or retire features of the service, including optional modules, at any time. When we do, we preserve records under the Persistence policy and, for paid features, follow the billing terms.

No recognition by third parties

1. ORI does not guarantee that any evaluation agency, funding body, indexer, database, search engine, library or institution — including research evaluation systems — recognizes, accepts, indexes or ranks ORI identifiers or the publications they identify.
2. Participants must not state or suggest that registration in ORI grants indexing, accreditation, evaluation scores, impact factors or any recognition it does not grant.

Accounts and credentials

1. Accounts are personal and non-transferable. You must give accurate information, confirm your email address and keep your data up to date.
2. Keep your password and the credentials you issue confidential. You are responsible for all activity carried out with your account and with those credentials.
3. Tell us at once, through the Contact page, about any loss, leak or unauthorized use, and revoke the affected credentials in the dashboard.
4. Organizations decide who acts for them and must remove the access of people who no longer should have it.
5. We may require additional verification, reset access or revoke credentials to protect the service.

Participation of organizations

1. Organizations apply to participate; we may approve, request information or decline any application at our discretion, without having to state reasons.
2. An approved organization must keep its institutional data, administrators and journals up to date.
3. Participation may depend on a paid plan or contract, under the billing terms.

Responsibilities of participants

1. Send accurate, complete and lawful content, and keep it up to date, including corrections, withdrawals and retractions, under the policies.
2. Hold all rights, licenses, consents and authorizations needed to send the content — including the consent of authors and other people named in it where the law requires — and to grant the license in these terms.
3. Publish the articles you register on a public website and keep their official addresses working or updated.
4. Register only your own publications, each only once, and only scholarly content.
5. Comply with the laws that apply to you, including copyright, data protection and research ethics rules.
6. Handle integrity concerns about your publications diligently and in good faith.

Identifiers

1. Identifiers are assigned by ORI as part of the service. No participant or user acquires property, exclusivity or any right over an identifier code beyond its use to identify and cite the record.
2. Identifiers are never transferred, reassigned, edited or reused, including after withdrawal, retraction, cancellation of a reservation or the end of a participation.
3. Records are never deleted. Withdrawals, retractions and corrections follow the Retractions and corrections policy.

Acceptable use

You must not, and must not allow others to:

• Present ORI identifiers as DOIs, Crossref registrations or accreditations, or suggest an endorsement, certification or partnership of ORI or Oxton Education.
• Send false, misleading, plagiarized, infringing, defamatory or unlawful content, or personal data that is not needed for bibliographic identification.
• Register publications of journals you do not represent, duplicate registrations, or use ORI for non-scholarly or commercial advertising content.
• Interfere with the service: bypass rate limits, authentication or security measures, probe or scan for vulnerabilities without written authorization, send malware, or overload the infrastructure.
• Access accounts, records, drafts or data of other participants, or use credentials of other people.
• Scrape the service in a way that degrades it instead of using the API and OAI-PMH within their limits.
• Collect personal data of users or authors from the service for marketing, profiling or any purpose unrelated to scholarly communication.
• Use the ORI name, logo or icon in a way that may confuse, mislead or suggest affiliation, or register domain names, accounts or marks that may be confused with them.
• Resell, sublicense or offer the service, or access to it, as your own, except as expressly allowed in writing.
• Reverse engineer the service, except where the law expressly allows it.

API, OAI-PMH and connectors

1. The APIs, OAI-PMH and connectors are offered under these terms and their documentation, which may change. We will try to announce incompatible changes in advance.
2. Rate limits and other technical limits apply and may be adjusted to protect the service. We may block clients that exceed them or behave abusively.
3. When you build on the public data, we recommend citing ORI as the source and linking to the record pages. You must not state that your product is offered or endorsed by ORI.
4. Software made available by ORI (such as connectors) is provided as is, under its own license when one is stated.

Content and licenses

1. Participants keep the rights they hold over their content.
2. By sending content, the participant grants ORI and Oxton Education a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable and perpetual license to store, reproduce, adapt for technical purposes, publish, distribute, index, convert to other formats and preserve it, and to allow others to read, cite and reuse the public metadata, for the purposes of the service — including after the participant leaves ORI.
3. Public metadata is made available through the record pages, exports, the API and OAI-PMH. Deposited full texts are made available under the license declared by the participant.
4. Suggestions and feedback about the service may be used by us freely, without obligation.

Intellectual property of ORI

1. The ORI name, logo, icon, website, design, documentation, databases as a whole and software belong to Oxton Education or its licensors and are protected by law.
2. These terms grant no rights over them beyond the normal use of the service. Displaying the ORI icon next to an identifier, as the service does, is allowed.

Notices of infringement

1. Anyone who believes that content in ORI infringes their rights may notify us through the Contact page, identifying the content, the right affected and their contact details, and declaring in good faith that the information is accurate.
2. We may, at our discretion and without assessing the merits of the dispute, restrict access to a deposited file, add a notice to the record or contact the participant. Records and identifiers are not deleted.
3. The participant responsible for the content must answer the notice and resolve it with the claimant.

Integrity of the scholarly record

Concerns about publications, corrections, withdrawals, retractions and expressions of concern follow the Retractions and corrections policy and, where available, the ORI integrity workflows. ORI may add notices to records when a record is clearly inconsistent or misleading.

Plans, fees and payments

1. Issuing new identifiers and some features depend on the plan or contract of the organization. Prices, taxes, renewals, cancellations, refunds and invoices follow the billing terms published with the plans.
2. Payments are processed by the payment provider; card data never reaches ORI.
3. Unpaid amounts may lead to the suspension of new issuance and paid features, never to the removal of records already issued.
4. We may change prices and plans for future periods with prior notice.

Privacy and data protection

Personal data is processed under the Privacy and data protection policy and the LGPD. Participants are responsible for the lawfulness of the personal data they include in their content and must tell us about any request concerning it.

Confidentiality

Non-public information exchanged in the dashboard — drafts, registration requests, integrity cases, credentials and commercial terms — must be kept confidential by the parties and used only for the purposes of the service, except where disclosure is required by law.

Availability and support

1. We work to keep the service available, but it may be interrupted for maintenance, updates, security reasons or events beyond our control. Planned maintenance and incidents are announced on the System status page when possible.
2. Support is offered through the Contact page, on business days, without a guaranteed response time unless agreed in a contract.

Suspension and termination

1. We may suspend or terminate, with immediate effect where needed, the access of users, credentials, journals or organizations that breach these terms or the policies, put the service, other participants or third parties at risk, act unlawfully or fail to pay.
2. We will give notice whenever possible and reasonable, except where this could harm an investigation, the security of the service or third parties.
3. An organization may stop participating at any time, subject to the billing terms for any paid period.
4. In every case, identifiers already issued and public records stay public and resolving under the Persistence policy, and are not deleted.

Disclaimers

1. The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind beyond those that cannot be excluded by law, including warranties of fitness for a particular purpose, of uninterrupted availability or of the absence of errors.
2. We are not responsible for the content of publications, for the metadata and files sent by participants, for decisions taken on the basis of the records, or for third-party websites and services, including the journal websites the records point to.

Limitation of liability

1. To the extent permitted by law, ORI and Oxton Education are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, loss of profits, revenue, data, opportunities or reputation, arising from the use of or the inability to use the service, or from content sent by participants or third parties.
2. Where liability cannot be excluded, the total liability of ORI and Oxton Education for all claims related to the service is limited to the amounts actually paid by the organization for the service in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim, or, if nothing was paid, to the minimum amount allowed by law.
3. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited under the law, including for wilful misconduct.

Indemnification

Participants and users will defend, indemnify and hold harmless ORI, Oxton Education and their staff from any claims, losses, damages, fines, costs and reasonable legal fees arising from the content they send, from the infringement of rights of third parties, from the breach of these terms or the policies, or from the misuse of their accounts and credentials.

Force majeure

Neither party is liable for failures caused by events beyond its reasonable control, such as natural disasters, failures of telecommunication or energy providers, cyberattacks, acts of authorities or epidemics, while they last.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms to reflect changes to the service, the policies or the law. The date of the last update is shown on this page. Material changes are announced to institutional administrators at least 15 days in advance, except when required sooner by law or for security. Continued use after the effective date means acceptance of the new terms; anyone who does not agree may stop using the service.

General provisions

1. These terms, the policies, the billing terms and any contract signed with an organization form the entire agreement on the service. A signed contract prevails over these terms where they conflict.
2. If any provision is held invalid, the others remain in force, and the invalid one is replaced by a valid provision as close as possible to its purpose.
3. Not enforcing a right does not waive it.
4. Participants may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor that takes over the service, which remains bound by the Persistence policy.
5. Notices may be given by email to the addresses registered in the accounts, through the dashboard or on this website.
6. The provisions on identifiers, licenses, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification and governing law survive the end of the participation.

Governing law and disputes

1. These terms are governed by the laws of the Federative Republic of Brazil.
2. The parties will first try to settle any dispute amicably through the Contact page, within 30 days of the first notice.
3. If no agreement is reached, the courts of the registered office of Oxton Education will have jurisdiction, except where the law grants another forum that cannot be waived, including to consumers.

Contact

Questions about these terms, notices of infringement and requests can be sent through the channels on the Contact page.