Digital object identifier

Content

Major content of the DOI system currently includes:

• Scholarly materials (journal articles, books, ebooks, etc.) through Crossref, a consortium of around 3,000 publishers; Airiti, a leading provider of Chinese and Taiwanese electronic academic journals; 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.

Other registries include Crossref and the multilingual European DOI Registration Agency (mEDRA). Since 2015, RFCs can be referenced as doi:10.17487/rfc....

Features and benefits

The IDF designed the DOI system to provide persistent identification. Each DOI name permanently and clearly identifies the object it belongs to (although when the publisher of a journal changes, sometimes all the DOIs will be changed, with the old DOIs no longer working). 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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 both 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" does not 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. In May, 2024, an Internet Draft was introduced to register the "doi" scheme. Many experts were not aware of this draft, and the latest draft has currently expired.

Resolution

To resolve a DOI name, it may be input to a DOI resolver, such as one at the official website https://doi.org/.

DOI name resolution is provided through the Handle System, which is an infrastructure developed and operated by CNRI (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.

Another approach, which avoids typing or copying 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) 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.

An interesting consequence of the fact that DOIs depend entirely on CNRI's Handle System infrastructure (whereby CNRI operates the global root servers and wrote the protocol) is that the proxy services DOI.org/<#> and hdl.handle.net/<#> are interoperable. For example, the following URIs resolve to the same publication:
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0021-9258(19)52451-6
https://hdl.handle.net/10.1016/S0021-9258(19)52451-6

There are other DOI resolvers and HTTP Proxies apart from NCRI's Handle System. At the beginning of the year 2016, a new class of alternative DOI resolvers was started by http://doai.io/ (now discontinued ). This service was unusual in that it tried to find a non-paywalled (often author archived) version of a title and redirected the user to that instead of the publisher's version. Since then, other open-access favoring DOI resolvers have been created, notably https://oadoi.org/ in October 2016 (rebranded in 2017 as https://unpaywall.org/). While traditional DOI resolvers solely rely on the Handle System, alternative DOI resolvers first consult multiple Open Access resources such as institutional libraries with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), or indexing services based in OAI-PMH, such as BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

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, which depend on domain names and may be subject to change, while still allowing the DOI to be treated as a normal hyperlink. 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 organization created in 1997, is the governance body of the DOI system. 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.

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. 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, which was approved by 100% of those voting in a ballot closing on 15 November 2010. The final standard was published on 23 April 2012.

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.

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

The maintainers of the DOI system have registered a DOI namespace for URNs.