Digital object identifier

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to identify objects uniquely, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).[1] An implementation of the Handle System,[2][3] DOIs are in wide use mainly to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications. However, they also have been used to identify other types of information resources, such as commercial videos.

Digital object identifier
AcronymDOI
OrganisationInternational DOI Foundation
Introduced2000 (2000)
Example10.1000/182
Websitewww.doi.org

A DOI aims to be "resolvable", usually to some form of access to the information object to which the DOI refers. This is achieved by binding the DOI to metadata about the object, such as a URL, indicating where the object can be found. Thus, by being actionable and interoperable, a DOI differs from identifiers such as ISBNs and ISRCs which aim only to identify their referents uniquely. The DOI system uses the indecs Content Model for representing metadata.

The DOI for a document remains fixed over the lifetime of the document, whereas its location and other metadata may change. Referring to an online document by its DOI is supposed to provide a more stable link than simply using its URL. But every time a URL changes, the publisher has to update the metadata for the DOI to link to the new URL.[4][5][6] It is the publisher's responsibility to update the DOI database. If they fail to do so, the DOI resolves to a dead link leaving the DOI useless.

The developer and administrator of the DOI system is the International DOI Foundation (IDF), which introduced it in 2000.[7] Organizations that meet the contractual obligations of the DOI system and are willing to pay to become a member of the system can assign DOIs.[8] The DOI system is implemented through a federation of registration agencies coordinated by the IDF.[9] By late April 2011 more than 50 million DOI names had been assigned by some 4,000 organizations,[10] and by April 2013 this number had grown to 85 million DOI names assigned through 9,500 organizations.

Nomenclature and syntax

A DOI is a type of Handle System handle, which takes the form of a character string divided into two parts, a prefix and a suffix, separated by a slash.

prefix/suffix

The prefix identifies the registrant of the identifier and the suffix is chosen by the registrant and identifies the specific object associated with that DOI. Most legal Unicode characters are allowed in these strings, which are interpreted in a case-insensitive manner. The prefix usually takes the form 10.NNNN, where NNNN is at least a four digit number greater than or equal to 1000, whose limit depends only on the total number of registrants.[11][12] The prefix may be further subdivided with periods, like 10.NNNN.N.[13]

For example, in the DOI name 10.1000/182, the prefix is 10.1000 and the suffix is 182. The "10." part of the prefix distinguishes the handle as part of the DOI namespace, as opposed to some other Handle System namespace,[upper-alpha 1] and the characters 1000 in the prefix identify the registrant; in this case the registrant is the International DOI Foundation itself. 182 is the suffix, or item ID, identifying a single object (in this case, the latest version of the DOI Handbook).

DOI names can identify creative works (such as texts, images, audio or video items, and software) in both electronic and physical forms, performances, and abstract works[14] such as licenses, parties to a transaction, etc.

The names can refer to objects at varying levels of detail: thus DOI names can identify a journal, an individual issue of a journal, an individual article in the journal, or a single table in that article. The choice of level of detail is left to the assigner, but in the DOI system it must be declared as part of the metadata that is associated with a DOI name, using a data dictionary based on the indecs Content Model.

Display

The official DOI Handbook explicitly states that DOIs should display on screens and in print in the format doi:10.1000/182.[15]

Contrary to the DOI Handbook, CrossRef, a major DOI registration agency, recommends displaying a URL (for example, https://doi.org/10.1000/182) instead of the officially specified format (for example, doi:10.1000/182)[16][17] This URL is persistent (there is a contract that ensures persistence in the DOI.ORG domain), so it is a PURL – providing the location of an HTTP proxy server which will redirect web accesses to the correct online location of the linked item.[8][18]

The CrossRef recommendation is primarily based on the assumption that the DOI is being displayed without being hyperlinked to its appropriate URL – the argument being that without the hyperlink it is not as easy to copy-and-paste the full URL to actually bring up the page for the DOI, thus the entire URL should be displayed, allowing people viewing the page containing the DOI to copy-and-paste the URL, by hand, into a new window/tab in their browser in order to go to the appropriate page for the document the DOI represents.[19]

Since DOI is a namespace within the Handle system, it is semantically correct to represent it as the URI info:doi/10.1000/182.

Applications

Major applications of the DOI system currently include:

  • Scholarly materials (journal articles, books, ebooks, etc.) through CrossRef, a consortium of around 3,000 publishers; Airiti, a leading provider of electronic academic journals in Chinese and Taiwanese; and the Japan Link Center (JaLC) an organization providing link management and DOI assignment for electronic academic journals in Japanese.
  • Research datasets through Datacite, a consortium of leading research libraries, technical information providers, and scientific data centers;
  • European Union official publications through the EU publications office;
  • The Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure project at Tsinghua University and the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), two initiatives sponsored by the Chinese government.
  • Permanent global identifiers for both commercial and non-commercial audio/visual content titles, edits, and manifestations through the Entertainment ID Registry, commonly known as EIDR.

In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's publication service OECD iLibrary, each table or graph in an OECD publication is shown with a DOI name that leads to an Excel file of data underlying the tables and graphs. Further development of such services is planned.[20]

Other registries include Crossref and the multilingual European DOI Registration Agency.[21] Since 2015, RFCs can be referenced as doi:10.17487/rfc….[22]

Features and benefits

The IDF designed the DOI system to provide a form of persistent identification, in which each DOI name permanently and unambiguously identifies the object to which it is associated. It also associates metadata with objects, allowing it to provide users with relevant pieces of information about the objects and their relationships. Included as part of this metadata are network actions that allow DOI names to be resolved to web locations where the objects they describe can be found. To achieve its goals, the DOI system combines the Handle System and the indecs Content Model with a social infrastructure.

The Handle System ensures that the DOI name for an object is not based on any changeable attributes of the object such as its physical location or ownership, that the attributes of the object are encoded in its metadata rather than in its DOI name, and that no two objects are assigned the same DOI name. Because DOI names are short character strings, they are human-readable, may be copied and pasted as text, and fit into the URI specification. The DOI name-resolution mechanism acts behind the scenes, so that users communicate with it in the same way as with any other web service; it is built on open architectures, incorporates trust mechanisms, and is engineered to operate reliably and flexibly so that it can be adapted to changing demands and new applications of the DOI system.[23] DOI name-resolution may be used with OpenURL to select the most appropriate among multiple locations for a given object, according to the location of the user making the request.[24] However, despite this ability, the DOI system has drawn criticism from librarians for directing users to non-free copies of documents that would have been available for no additional fee from alternative locations.[25]

The indecs Content Model as used within the DOI system associates metadata with objects. A small kernel of common metadata is shared by all DOI names and can be optionally extended with other relevant data, which may be public or restricted. Registrants may update the metadata for their DOI names at any time, such as when publication information changes or when an object moves to a different URL.

The International DOI Foundation (IDF) oversees the integration of these technologies and operation of the system through a technical and social infrastructure. The social infrastructure of a federation of independent registration agencies offering DOI services was modelled on existing successful federated deployments of identifiers such as GS1 and ISBN.

Comparison with other identifier schemes

A DOI name differs from commonly used Internet pointers to material, such as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), in that it identifies an object itself as a first-class entity, rather than the specific place where the object is located at a certain time. It implements the Uniform Resource Identifier (Uniform Resource Name) concept and adds to it a data model and social infrastructure.[26]

A DOI name also differs from standard identifier registries such as the ISBN, ISRC, etc. The purpose of an identifier registry is to manage a given collection of identifiers, whereas the primary purpose of the DOI system is to make a collection of identifiers actionable and interoperable, where that collection can include identifiers from many other controlled collections.[27]

The DOI system offers persistent, semantically-interoperable resolution to related current data and is best suited to material that will be used in services outside the direct control of the issuing assigner (e.g., public citation or managing content of value). It uses a managed registry (providing social and technical infrastructure). It does not assume any specific business model for the provision of identifiers or services and enables other existing services to link to it in defined ways. Several approaches for making identifiers persistent have been proposed. The comparison of persistent identifier approaches is difficult because they are not all doing the same thing. Imprecisely referring to a set of schemes as "identifiers" doesn't mean that they can be compared easily. Other "identifier systems" may be enabling technologies with low barriers to entry, providing an easy to use labeling mechanism that allows anyone to set up a new instance (examples include Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL), URLs, Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs), etc.), but may lack some of the functionality of a registry-controlled scheme and will usually lack accompanying metadata in a controlled scheme. The DOI system does not have this approach and should not be compared directly to such identifier schemes. Various applications using such enabling technologies with added features have been devised that meet some of the features offered by the DOI system for specific sectors (e.g., ARK).

A DOI name does not depend on the object's location and, in this way, is similar to a Uniform Resource Name (URN) or PURL but differs from an ordinary URL. URLs are often used as substitute identifiers for documents on the Internet although the same document at two different locations has two URLs. By contrast, persistent identifiers such as DOI names identify objects as first class entities: two instances of the same object would have the same DOI name.

Resolution

DOI name resolution is provided through the Handle System, developed by Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and is freely available to any user encountering a DOI name. Resolution redirects the user from a DOI name to one or more pieces of typed data: URLs representing instances of the object, services such as e-mail, or one or more items of metadata. To the Handle System, a DOI name is a handle, and so has a set of values assigned to it and may be thought of as a record that consists of a group of fields. Each handle value must have a data type specified in its <type> field, which defines the syntax and semantics of its data. While a DOI persistently and uniquely identifies the object to which it is assigned, DOI resolution may not be persistent, due to technical and administrative issues.

To resolve a DOI name, it may be input to a DOI resolver, such as doi.org.

Another approach, which avoids typing or cutting-and-pasting into a resolver is to include the DOI in a document as a URL which uses the resolver as an HTTP proxy, such as https://doi.org/ (preferred)[28] or http://dx.doi.org/, both of which support HTTPS. For example, the DOI 10.1000/182 can be included in a reference or hyperlink as https://doi.org/10.1000/182. This approach allows users to click on the DOI as a normal hyperlink. Indeed, as previously mentioned, this is how CrossRef recommends that DOIs always be represented (preferring HTTPS over HTTP), so that if they are cut-and-pasted into other documents, emails, etc., they will be actionable.

Other DOI resolvers and HTTP Proxies include http://hdl.handle.net, and https://doi.pangaea.de/. At the beginning of the year 2016, a new class of alternative DOI resolvers was started by http://doai.io. This service is unusual in that it tries to find a non-paywalled version of a title and redirects you to that instead of the publisher's version.[29][30] Since then, other open-access favoring DOI resolvers have been created, notably https://oadoi.org/ in October 2016[31] (later Unpaywall). While traditional DOI resolvers solely rely on the Handle System, alternative DOI resolvers first consult open access resources such as BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).[29][31]

An alternative to HTTP proxies is to use one of a number of add-ons and plug-ins for browsers, thereby avoiding the conversion of the DOIs to URLs,[32] which depend on domain names and may be subject to change, while still allowing the DOI to be treated as a normal hyperlink. For example. the CNRI Handle Extension for Firefox, enables the browser to access Handle System handles or DOIs like hdl:4263537/4000 or doi:10.1000/1 directly in the Firefox browser, using the native Handle System protocol. This plug-in can also replace references to web-to-handle proxy servers with native resolution. A disadvantage of this approach for publishers is that, at least at present, most users will be encountering the DOIs in a browser, mail reader, or other software which does not have one of these plug-ins installed.

IDF organizational structure

The International DOI Foundation (IDF), a non-profit organisation created in 1998, is the governance body of the DOI system.[33] It safeguards all intellectual property rights relating to the DOI system, manages common operational features, and supports the development and promotion of the DOI system. The IDF ensures that any improvements made to the DOI system (including creation, maintenance, registration, resolution and policymaking of DOI names) are available to any DOI registrant. It also prevents third parties from imposing additional licensing requirements beyond those of the IDF on users of the DOI system.

The IDF is controlled by a Board elected by the members of the Foundation, with an appointed Managing Agent who is responsible for co-ordinating and planning its activities. Membership is open to all organizations with an interest in electronic publishing and related enabling technologies. The IDF holds annual open meetings on the topics of DOI and related issues.

Registration agencies, appointed by the IDF, provide services to DOI registrants: they allocate DOI prefixes, register DOI names, and provide the necessary infrastructure to allow registrants to declare and maintain metadata and state data. Registration agencies are also expected to actively promote the widespread adoption of the DOI system, to cooperate with the IDF in the development of the DOI system as a whole, and to provide services on behalf of their specific user community. A list of current RAs is maintained by the International DOI Foundation. The IDF is recognized as one of the federated registrars for the Handle System by the DONA Foundation (of which the IDF is a board member), and is responsible for assigning Handle System prefixes under the top-level 10 prefix.[34]

Registration agencies generally charge a fee to assign a new DOI name; parts of these fees are used to support the IDF. The DOI system overall, through the IDF, operates on a not-for-profit cost recovery basis.

Standardization

The DOI system is an international standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization in its technical committee on identification and description, TC46/SC9.[35] The Draft International Standard ISO/DIS 26324, Information and documentation – Digital Object Identifier System met the ISO requirements for approval. The relevant ISO Working Group later submitted an edited version to ISO for distribution as an FDIS (Final Draft International Standard) ballot,[36] which was approved by 100% of those voting in a ballot closing on 15 November 2010.[37] The final standard was published on 23 April 2012.[1]

DOI is a registered URI under the info URI scheme specified by IETF RFC 4452. info:doi/ is the infoURI Namespace of Digital Object Identifiers.[38]

The DOI syntax is a NISO standard, first standardised in 2000, ANSI/NISO Z39.84-2005 Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier.[39]

The maintainers of the DOI system have deliberately not registered a DOI namespace for URNs, stating that:

URN architecture assumes a DNS-based Resolution Discovery Service (RDS) to find the service appropriate to the given URN scheme. However no such widely deployed RDS schemes currently exist.... DOI is not registered as a URN namespace, despite fulfilling all the functional requirements, since URN registration appears to offer no advantage to the DOI System. It requires an additional layer of administration for defining DOI as a URN namespace (the string urn:doi:10.1000/1 rather than the simpler doi:10.1000/1) and an additional step of unnecessary redirection to access the resolution service, already achieved through either http proxy or native resolution. If RDS mechanisms supporting URN specifications become widely available, DOI will be registered as a URN.

— International DOI Foundation, Factsheet: DOI System and Internet Identifier Specifications[40]

Prefix and publisher

Usually a prefix of DOI code corresponds to a publisher.

DOI prefix publisher
10.1001 American Medical Association
10.1002 Wiley-VCH (Germany)
10.1007 Springer (Germany)
10.1016 Elsevier
10.1021 American Chemical Society
10.1038 Nature Publishing Group
10.1039 Royal Society of Chemistry
10.1080 Informa
10.1093 Oxford University Press
10.1095 HighWire Press
10.1111 Wiley-Blackwell (United States)
10.1155 Hindawi Publishing Corporation
10.1159 Karger Publishers
10.1210 The Endocrine Society (United States)
10.1371 Public Library of Science (PLOS)
10.1530 Bioscientifica
10.2147 Dove Medical Press
10.3389 Frontiers Media
10.3390 MDPI
10.4314 African Journals OnLine
10.7150 Ivyspring International Publisher
gollark: ```print "Hacked with Python 2 or Lua"```
gollark: (produced by the common Unix tool `haxxdump`)
gollark: 011d3b0 ecda fe42 f33d d112 2b8c 7e1d 24d2 11e5011d3c0 2475 ae6a bb0f 0c59 592b 3e75 6074 5f61011d3d0 ff42 a907 c773 c81f 3095 97ba 7fe2 5270011d3e0 c021 d886 1dfc 01eb f22a 0174 38cb ab3e011d3f0 2476 6efa 2bb0 6dde cd92 0222 5467 7221011d400 bb13 2647 77f7 8c51 6206 e40d 3c85 117c011d410 86bb 928f 2234 bb31 298e dd89 7209 6a00011d420 49b1 182b 52fc 6659 f720 c14c 7064 213c011d430 be13 5b7f 36db 9228 232a be39 1c9e 4065011d440 3e92 3fa8 a538 8a60 c599 7c88 9f72 9748011d450 8a5d fc83 b21b e48d 666a 8670 3d61 0225
gollark: I have made many a useless side project.
gollark: I mean, there's a difference between programming and, say, sysadmin stuff, but yes.

See also

Notes
  1. Other registries are identified by other strings at the start of the prefix. Handle names that begin with "100." are also in use, as for example in the following citation: Hammond, Joseph L., Jr.; Brown, James E.; Liu, Shyan-Shiang S. (May 1975). "Development of a Transmission Error Model and an Error Control Model l". Technical Report RADC-TR-75-138. Rome Air Development Center. Bibcode:1975STIN...7615344H. hdl:100.2/ADA013939. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

References
  1. "ISO 26324:2012(en), Information and documentation – Digital object identifier system". ISO. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
  2. "The Handle System".
  3. "Factsheets".
  4. Witten, Ian H.; David Bainbridge & David M. Nichols (2010). How to Build a Digital Library (2nd ed.). Amsterdam; Boston: Morgan Kaufmann. pp. 352–253. ISBN 978-0-12-374857-7.
  5. Langston, Marc; Tyler, James (2004). "Linking to journal articles in an online teaching environment: The persistent link, DOI, and OpenURL". The Internet and Higher Education. 7 (1): 51–58. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2003.11.004.
  6. "How the 'Digital Object Identifier' works". BusinessWeek. BusinessWeek. 23 July 2001. Retrieved 20 April 2010. Assuming the publishers do their job of maintaining the databases, these centralized references, unlike current web links, should never become outdated or broken.
  7. Paskin, Norman (2010), "Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System", Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), Taylor and Francis, pp. 1586–1592
  8. Davidson, Lloyd A.; Douglas, Kimberly (December 1998). "Digital Object Identifiers: Promise and problems for scholarly publishing". Journal of Electronic Publishing. 4 (2). doi:10.3998/3336451.0004.203.
  9. "Welcome to the DOI System". Doi.org. 28 June 2010. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
  10. "DOI News, April 2011: 1. DOI System exceeds 50 million assigned identifiers". Doi.org. 20 April 2011. Retrieved 3 July 2011.
  11. "doi info & guidelines". CrossRef.org. Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. 2013. Archived from the original on 21 October 2002. Retrieved 10 June 2016. All DOI prefixes begin with "10" to distinguish the DOI from other implementations of the Handle System followed by a four-digit number or string (the prefix can be longer if necessary).
  12. "Factsheet—Key Facts on Digital Object Identifier System". doi.org. International DOI Foundation. 6 June 2016. Retrieved 10 June 2016. Over 18,000 DOI name prefixes within the DOI System
  13. "DOI Handbook—2 Numbering". doi.org. International DOI Foundation. 1 February 2016. Retrieved 10 June 2016. The registrant code may be further divided into sub-elements for administrative convenience if desired. Each sub-element of the registrant code shall be preceded by a full stop.
  14. "Frequently asked questions about the DOI system: 6. What can a DOI name be assigned to?". International DOI Foundation. 3 July 2018 [update of earlier version]. Retrieved 19 July 2018. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  15. "DOI Handbook – Numbering". doi.org. 13 February 2014. Section 2.6.1 Screen and print presentation. Archived from the original on 30 June 2014. Retrieved 30 June 2014.
  16. "DOI Display Guidelines".
  17. "New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way".
  18. Powell, Andy (June 1998). "Resolving DOI Based URNs Using Squid: An Experimental System at UKOLN". D-Lib Magazine. ISSN 1082-9873.
  19. ChrissieCW. "Crossref Revises DOI Display Guidelines - Crossref". www.crossref.org.
  20. Green, T. (2009). "We Need Publishing Standards for Datasets and Data Tables". Research Information. doi:10.1787/603233448430.
  21. "multilingual European DOI Registration Agency". mEDRA.org. 2003.
  22. Levine, John R. (2015). "Assigning Digital Object Identifiers to RFCs § DOIs for RFCs". IAB. doi:10.17487/rfc7669. RFC 7669.
  23. Timmer, John (6 March 2010). "DOIs and their discontents". Ars Technica. Retrieved 5 March 2013.
  24. DeRisi, Susanne; Kennison, Rebecca; Twyman, Nick (2003). "Editorial: The what and whys of DOIs". PLoS Biology. 1 (2): e57. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0000057. PMC 261894. PMID 14624257.
  25. Franklin, Jack (2003). "Open access to scientific and technical information: the state of the art". In Grüttemeier, Herbert; Mahon, Barry (eds.). Open access to scientific and technical information: state of the art and future trends. IOS Press. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-58603-377-4.
  26. "DOI System and Internet Identifier Specifications". Doi.org. 18 May 2010. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
  27. "DOI System and standard identifier registries". Doi.org. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
  28. International DOI Foundation (7 August 2014). "Resolution". DOI Handbook. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
  29. "DOAI". CAPSH (Committee for the Accessibility of Publications in Sciences and Humanities). Retrieved 6 August 2016.
  30. Schonfeld, Roger C. (3 March 2016). "Co-opting 'Official' Channels through Infrastructures for Openness". The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
  31. Piwowar, Heather (25 October 2016). "Introducing oaDOI: resolve a DOI straight to OA". Retrieved 17 March 2017.
  32. "DOI System Tools".
  33. "Chapter 7: The International DOI Foundation". DOI Handbook. Doi.org. Retrieved 8 July 2015.
  34. "DONA Foundation Multi-Primary Administrators". Archived from the original on 14 January 2017. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
  35. "Digital object identifier (DOI) becomes an ISO standard". iso.org. 10 May 2012. Retrieved 10 May 2012.
  36. "about_the_doi.html DOI Standards and Specifications". Doi.org. 28 June 2010. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
  37. "Overviews & Standards – Standards and Specifications: 1. ISO TC46/SC9 Standards". Doi.org. 18 November 2010. Retrieved 3 July 2011.
  38. "About "info" URIs – Frequently Asked Questions". Info-uri.info. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
  39. "ANSI/NISO Z39.84-2000 Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier". Techstreet.com. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
  40. International DOI Foundation (2012).
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