DOIs at the Libraries

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are important components of scholarly infrastructure. For a bit more detail on how they work, and how the Libraries can help you create and manage them, please see below.

What are DOIs?

DOIs serve to provide permanent urls for online-accessible journal articles, datasets, posters, and other web resources. The materials assigned to DOIs are accessed with urls following the pattern https://doi.org/prefix/suffix. The DOI url redirects users automatically to the resource which has been assigned to it by the DOI’s creator. If the resource’s url changes, the DOI itself must be updated to point to the new location. This allows the DOI link to remain permanent, even as the underlying web address of the resource may change.

DOI Service

MSU Libraries (MSUL) creates, or “mints”, DOIs via its affiliation with DataCite, an open scholarship organization which maintains affiliations with a wide range of academic institutions. The MSUL Digital Repository and Knowledge Commons Open Works are among the most prominent users of this DOI service, along with a few other MSU-maintained journals. The MSUL contract currently allows us to create up to 100,000 DOIs per year.

Please note that while the major DOI agencies (DataCite, CrossRef) provide similar services, there are some subtle but key differences you may wish to review before embarking on DOI creation.

DOIs can be created manually via a web form, in bulk by file upload, or by automation using the DataCite API. Each resource to be assigned a DOI will need basic descriptive metadata, such as author, title, publication, etc.

If you have a use case for creating DOIs, we may be able to help. While DOIs can be created independently for any web-accessible scholarly work, in some cases obtaining a DOI by submitting to an online repository such as MSU’s Knowledge Commons, might be the better option. 

The key responsibilities for creating and managing DOIs are:

1. Supplying adequate metadata so that the resource is accurately described and findable. This metadata will be indexed by search engines and academic indexing services.
2. Updating the URL linked to the DOI if the resource ever changes web address.

These roles may be performed by the manager of the resource (the journal’s editor, for example), or in some cases, by a member of the Libraries staff. Any agreement to create DOIs via DataCite will include clear delineations of these responsibilities. DOI managers should set aside some time for review of DataCite’s training materials.

Please contact LIB.DL.rdmgteam@msu.edu for more information and to get started.