#digital object identifier

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system is a standardized method used for identifying and accessing digital content, especially in academic and professional publishing. A DOI provides a persistent, unique alphanumeric string that is permanently assigned to a piece of intellectual property—such as a research paper, book, thesis, dataset, or report—so it can be reliably cited and accessed…

One objective of scientific research is to publish the results, then anyone can get them and read them. At least that is what you might think. However, that noble thought does not always follow. Scientific papers that were printed on paper are not necessarily available if your local library does not have the copy. You may say that these are being archived electronically, but quite often all you…

Want a permanent DOI assigned to your data and code? Follow this simple recipe

These days with data and code often required to be designated as open-source, licenced, and fully trackable for most manuscript submissions to a peer-reviewed journal, it’s easy to get lost in the multitude of platforms and options available. In most cases, we no longer have much of a choice to do so, even if you are reticent (although the benefits of posting your data and code online immediately…

Open Science Continues to Evolve as Preprint Repositories for Specialized Fields of Scientific Inquiry Multiply

As Earth and Space Science Open Archive (ESSOAr) is inaugurated, open peer feedback to, rapid research output sharing of and digital object identifiers (DOIs) for pre-prints indicate a growing acceptance for Open Access in science.

A Blog Article by Pablo Markin.

On September 24, 2017, American Geophysical Union and Atypon have announcedthe launch of their ESSOAr initiative for the Open Access…

(NewsnMusic) T.I just can’t escape the drama. Instead of attracting foodies and fans, T.I’s new restaurant, Scale 925, has attracted a different crowd. TMZ reports that the highly publicized soul food restaurant was the scene of a shootout involving a group of customers, leaving one man injured and arrested for drug possession, and another on the run. According to cops, a group of about 5 or 6…

Power can corrupt even the honest

New research, published in The Leadership Quarterly, highlights the influence of power in leader corruption When appointing a new leader, selectors base their choice on several factors and typically look for leaders with desirable characteristics such as honesty and trustworthiness. However once leaders are in power, can we trust…

It seems a strange thing to take an interest in, but for readers of journals, DOIs (digital object identifiers) are commonplace, and understanding how the heaving virtual library is organised can be useful in all sorts of ways.

I stumbled upon an (arguably) interesting blog post, DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right? » via PLOS Blogs, Research findings: going deeper than the article.

CrossRef is a DOI registration agency, though there are actually 8 such agencies, and DOIs hold no information on which was used to create them. This leads to some inconsistencies in their compatibility with the web services called “APIs” (application programming interfaces), which provide standardised means to access information on content at a DOI 'address'. For example,

The South Park movie has a DOI:

http://dx.doi.org/10.5240/B1FA-0EEC-C316-3316-3A73-L

This following two DOIs point to the same article- there is no apparent difference between the two copies:

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.91541

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2012.7151.1

These journals assigned DOIs, but not through CrossRef:

http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/BIR-2008-0496

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.95564

http://dx.doi.org/10.3205/cto000081

To search metadata for the above examples, you need to visit four sites:

http://search.crossref.org

https://ui.eidr.org/search

https://www.medra.org/en/search.htm

http://search.datacite.org/ui

The truth is, the DOI has nothing specifically to do with citation or scholarly publishing. It is simply an identifier that can be used for virtually any application.

One of the more common companions to CrossRef (a not-for-profit body representing commercial publishers) is DataCite (comprising public research organisations, plus Microsoft Research), who assign DOIs for the up and coming data repository figshare.

See also ✖ Fundref - CrossRef's provided means to access funding information related to scholarly content

✖ CrossCheck - used by many universities (on iThenticate) to check for plagiarism in essays etc. (Turnitin). Presentation slides from the neuroscientist who created Turnitin describe how it works with CrossCheck here.

✖ CrossMark - informs readers of changes to content in a publication, including within a pdf file. A video explaining it is available at CrossRef's site (below), plus some of their conference slides on SlideShare.