Hi Sherin,
Welcome to the Crossref forum!
Crossref is a trade organization so individuals are unfortunately ineligible for membership and unable to register DOIs and deposit metadata directly. A small number of universities and colleges register DOIs for their students’ theses/disseratations but this may not be very useful if you are an independent researcher and/or your institution does not register DOIs for student-authored works.
That’s one problem. The other issue is that Crossref isn’t a repository for articles/books/dissertations. Rather, we are a repository for member-submitted metadata about those articles/books/dissertations, which is all the metadata associated with a DOI.
If you’re looking to host your dissertation on a repository that will assign a DOI, you may consider one of two options (though I can’t guarantee these are your only options):
- A preprint server in the relevant discipline (some though not all of which assign DOIs as part of the hosting process)
- Zenodo, a general repository on which all hosted materials are assigned a DataCite DOI
I hope one of these options can be useful to you. If you have any other questions, we’re always happy to help answer them!
—Collin