Video Discription |
A DOI is a Digital Object Identifier, which does exactly what its name implies – it identifies a digital object. DOIs are particularly common for scientific and academic journal articles, but they are also used for identifying many other kinds of documents and materials such as research reports and presentations, data files and data sets, official or government publications, book chapters, audio and video items, images and performances, software and more. DOIs might even be assigned at several levels of a single publication, so a DOI could be associated with a journal title, another with a specific issue of that journal, yet another with an individual article within the issue, and still another with a single section or table within the article.
A DOI for any given object is not only unique but also resolvable, which means that each DOI will resolve to some form of access to the object it identifies, taking the user to an internet location where the object, part of the object or metadata about the object can be found. Each DOI is also persistent, which means that it will always identify the same object and will never change, even when the object’s metadata changes or the object itself is moved and becomes associated with a different website, webpage, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL), making it a more stable identifier than a URL as long as the metadata associated with the DOI is current. DOIs can, however, lead readers to versions of documents behind paywalls even though there are free versions available elsewhere, so some DOI resolvers have been developed to favor open-access venues and free versions of the objects identified by searching for them first.
The International DOI Foundation is responsible for DOIs and manages a number of DOI registration agencies that provide services for those who wish to receive and register DOI names or handles. Although there is no set number of characters for DOIs, each DOI consists of a prefix and a suffix separated by a forward slash. The suffix is assigned and begins with the numeral ‘10,’ which distinguishes the character string as part of the DOI namespace; it continues with a full stop (or period) and then a series of four numbers or more (possibly divided by additional stops) that identify the registrant, who is usually the publisher, author or creator of the digital object. The suffix, on the other hand, can consist of numbers and letters, is chosen by the registrant, often includes the relevant ISSN or ISBN, and functions to identify the specific object associated with the DOI.
According to the International DOI Foundation, DOIs should take the form of this example for a journal article – doi:10.1017/S0362152900011995 – but Crossref, one of the main DOI registration agencies, recommends using an entire URL, which would take this form for the same article: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0362152900011995. As a persistent URL (or PURL), this will reliably and permanently redirect users to the correct web location. The DOI for a journal article can usually be found on the first page of the article or along with other metadata for the paper on the journal’s website, and the appropriate DOIs are frequently included in the complete bibliographical references provided for cited sources in academic and scientific publications. Aiw6t8__s1Q |