As an academic publisher, you want your work to be read — which means you want it to be both easily shared, and easily found. A DOI is the perfect solution: it provides a simple, sharable path to any article, issue, or title to which it is assigned. By assigning your work a unique DOI, you vastly improve its chances of finding new audiences. It takes a little bit of maintenance, but we promise you: it’s worth it.
What is a DOI? #
DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier. The “digital” here refers to the identifier, not necessarily the object — that is to say, DOIs can be assigned to physical or abstract objects, not just digital ones. But perhaps their most common use, and certainly the one that you’ll care about most as a publisher, is to identify and reliably point to electronic resources. That’s what we’ll be talking about here.
A DOI is somewhat unique in that it doesn’t merely name a resource. It is also designed to direct a user to the resource it identifies. For online publications, the practical upshot is that if you know an article’s DOI, you’re just one step away from reading that article in your web browser: all you need to do is enter “doi.org/” followed by the DOI into the address bar.
It may help to think of a DOI as having characteristics of both an ISSN and a URL: an ISSN tells you what the online publication is, a URL tells you where the online publication is, and a DOI does both.
There’s one more thing about DOIs worth mentioning here: DOIs are intended to be persistent. Ideally, a DOI should always point to the resource online, even if the named article has moved to a new webpage. There’s some upkeep from the DOI registrant (usually the publisher) involved in making this possible, but it’s simple to maintain. Indeed, it’s a testament to the ease of DOI maintenance that the average DOI does in fact tend to be more dependable than the average URL.
Why get DOIs? #
The biggest reason to get DOIs is simply that it makes your content easier to find, and easier to share — not just right after publication, but long into the future.
The DOI is one of the most convenient ways for a researcher to direct colleagues to recently published or cited work. For one thing, the user experience is very similar to that of simply bookmarking and following a URL…except, of course, that DOIs are longer-lived. A DOI shared months or even years after publication should still work; an old bookmarked URL, on the other hand, very possibly won’t. Additionally, a DOI can be assigned to an individual article (or, indeed, basically any discrete unit of work), allowing an author to share only exactly what is relevant to them. The more authors share an article, the more widely it will be read, and the more likely the article will increase your journal’s profile — so it’s to your benefit to make sharing easy.
But also, frankly, these days it’s simply an industry expectation. Authors, citation indexes, and libraries all expect publishers to make it easy to find and identify their works. As research moves ever more online, DOIs are just as necessary for a publication to be taken seriously as ISSNs have been for decades.
How do I get started with DOIs? #
The first step is to sign up with the appropriate registration agency.
Similarly to the ISSN system, DOIs are managed by a single, global governing body, working together with a number of smaller organizations, which in turn work with publishers and other DOI registrants. The smaller DOI-management organizations are called registration agencies, and each one specializes in a particular industry, region, or combination thereof.
Because of the way they are organized, DOI agencies can sometimes overlap in scope. A DOI registrant with multiple options would aim to choose the agency that best suits their industry, geographical location, and language; they should also check on each agency’s specific requirements or obligations for members. It may also help to look at any additional services the agency might provide: this can sometimes help make clear which types of objects an agency is best equipped to register.
If you’re a publisher of an academic journal, though — and particularly if you primarily publish in English — you’re very likely going to want to use Crossref, which provides DOIs for tens of thousands of publishers around the world, in all disciplines. There is an short application process for membership, and members pay an annual membership fee plus a smaller fee for each DOI registered (this is typical for registration agencies). Once you’re onboarded, you’ll be given an online account and assigned a prefix for your organization, which will be used in all DOIs you register.
Now, you’re ready to start assigning DOIs.
How do I assign and maintain my DOIs? #
DOI creation #
Assigning a DOI to a new work consists of choosing its DOI suffix, and creating an entry for that work (and its new suffix) with your DOI registration agency.
To do this, you’ll need to know and be able to provide certain basic metadata (the work’s abstract, title, contributors, and so on). And, of course, you need to provide the suffix you want the work to have, and where online the content will be hosted.
You can simply log in to your online user account and fill out the data one article, or issue, or journal at a time. Or, if you’re computer-savvy (or have a good IT team), you can set up an API connection to create an entry with the new metadata every time you publish a new article (or issue, or title).
Either way, once a work has been assigned its suffix, you can form the unique “DOI name” that identifies the resource: simply string together your publisher prefix, a forward slash, and the new DOI suffix.
Then, prepend “doi.org/” to the DOI name in your web browser’s address bar, and you’ll always be led to the resource — this is called “resolving the DOI.”
You can create DOI suffixes (and therefore DOI names) for basically any unit of research you publish. We recommend getting title-level (that is, series-level), issue-level, and article-level DOIs.
A final note: the ISSN Centre recommends that you use the journal’s ISSN in (or as) the DOI suffix for your title-level DOIs, as this ensures your journal’s ISSN and its DOI are linked. This is just a guideline, though; many publishers choose to use the journal’s abbreviation instead.
DOI care and maintenance #
If the metadata for a work changes, you need to update its entry with your registration agency. Most importantly, if you move the published version to a different webpage, you need to make sure you update this information in your DOI metadata. This is what ensures that a DOI link always resolves properly, no matter how long ago the reader bookmarked it. Again, if you’re computer-savvy you can send updates automatically; or, you can log in and make changes as needed.
And always be sure to publicize your DOIs by placing them prominently upon the works they identify. Readers, indexers, and librarians will look for them – so make sure they’re easy to find.
One more thing: Article versions #
Be aware that different versions of an article — preprint, published version (also known as the “version of record”), and any corrections — should each have their own DOIs.
As the publisher, you don’t generally need to be responsible for obtaining DOIs for preprints. In fact, by the time you receive a submission, it may already have one. In all likelihood, the author has deposited the article with one of a growing number of free repositories, like Zenodo or arXiv, which will assign free DOIs to deposited papers.
You do, however, want to make sure that such preprints get linked to the version of record. Generally, it’s possible to achieve this by adding the DOI of the version of record to the repository’s preprint metadata. You may simply ask your authors to make this update manually; as an alternative, arXiv provides a mechanism by which publishers can do so themselves automatically. We recommend doing whatever you can to ensure these updates are made, as this will increase the visibility of your published version.
And you will be responsible for obtaining new DOIs for any corrections you find it necessary to publish, and for linking earlier versions to the latest one. Your registration agency will likely have instructions on how best to manage this process.
What else should I know about DOIs? #
As so often happens, the DOI system has unfortunately attracted some malicious actors. On March 14, 2024, the DOI Foundation issued an alert stating:
There are unauthorized entities that mimic the DOI® logo and system and purport to register digital object identifiers. The DOI® Foundation’s Registration Agencies are the only entities authorized to issue DOI® identifiers that comply with ISO 26324. Before opening any link to or providing any information to any organization purporting to register digital object identifiers be sure to confirm that it is an authorized DOI® Registration Agency, as shown here.
Be vigilant, check your sources, and beware of imitators! When in doubt, you can always refer to the DOI Foundation’s website for the best and latest information about all things DOI.
Do I really need to do this? #
Well, we certainly think you do.
When starting a journal, you might naturally focus on questions of quality: how to attract top submissions; how to build a skilled editorial board; and so on. But it’s also important to remember that before readers can even judge a publication’s content, they simply need to find it. If your article is too difficult to track down, a reader may decide it’s not worth the trouble. You’ve probably been there yourself!
To ensure you don’t miss out on readers, you need to make sure there’s a straightforward, stable path to your each of your publications. So, don’t skip getting and maintaining DOIs. Give your authors a simple, reliable way to bring new readers — and new authors — to your publication, and set your journal up to flourish.
Further reading #
The DOI Foundation
The DOI Foundation: What is a DOI?
The DOI Foundation: List of registration agencies
Crossref: Metadata best practices
arXiv: Automated DOI and journal reference updates from publishers
DataCite: DataCite or Crossref
Header image by Marvin Meyer, available from Unsplash. Free to use under the Unsplash license.