Posting academic materials online is one of the main ways that scholars share their work and engage with others. There is so much material available and webpages are often updated or changed. So, it is important to post materials in a way that is accessible and trackable.
Getting a DOI assigned to scholarly items work is crucial when it comes to making work available. Publishers can track the number of citations through this single unique identifier. It also associates the metadata of the selected item.
What’s a DOI?
DOI stands for “Digital Object Identifier.”
It is a unique, permanent string of characters that identifies any digital “object.” More specifically, it is a unique number comprising a prefix and suffix separated by a forward slash.
A DOI represents the object (publication, report, dataset, etc.) itself, rather than its online location (webpage or URL, publisher, etc.).
This includes official publications like journal articles or book chapters. And academic, government, or professional information, like a thesis or dissertation, a presentation, or a dataset, can also get DOIs.
DOI registration
DOIs are governed by the non-profit organization, The DOI Foundation. It adopted an international standard in 2012 (updated in 2022). With users from across the globe, approximately 300 million DOIs have currently been assigned.
DOI registration agencies, including scientific search engines specifically, assign DOIs.
For example, Crossref is a popular agency that assigns DOIs to research-based publications.
The DOI is typically listed on the first page of a publication, often in the header or footer. It is also included as part of the citation, and most style guides recommend including DOIs in a bibliography.
What does a DOI do?
A DOI is a persistent number that makes work citable from a permanent online location. While URLs can change or a link can be broken, a publication’s DOI remains in perpetuity. Both published and unpublished, peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed, materials can have DOIs.
A DOI makes any object easier to find, without extensive google or database searches. A permanent location that tracks engagement with the material increases its visibility.
Registering work with a DOI officially marks the date of sharing or publication. This can help with protecting intellectual property or positioning work within a broader field.
How can you use it?
Have you needed to find something, but all you had was the digital object identifier?
This is actually a very useful piece of information. If you want to find an article, you can just go to the DOI Foundation site and look it up by using the following URL:
Enter https://doi.org/[digital object identifier number you want to look up]
This will make finding articles very easy to do.
DOIs and preprints
If the work has been officially published, then a DOI is assigned through the publisher’s registration. On the other hand, unpublished work, like a conference paper or a preprint, can be uploaded to an online repository, where a DOI can then be assigned. However, you should always check before submitting to make sure that the repository offers DOI registration.
Preprints, for example, are articles that have not yet been peer reviewed and published in a journal. The conventional peer-review and publication process can be slow, sometimes painstakingly so. Preprints offer an alternative to get scholarly research out into the world before it is officially evaluated.
Open access publishing, preprints, and the use of online repositories like Preprints.org complement each other.
Preprint articles and posts can also be linked to an ORCID number, another form of unique identifier for researchers. Each of these makes research more accessible, discoverable, and citable.
