About the Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

In my August 9 entry (“Tag This Page!“), I quoted a section of Clay Shirky’s “Ontology is Overrated” essay about how social bookmarks (“tags”) increase the value of items that have unique identifiers, such as the ISBN number of books and the URLs of web pages.

URLs as a way of identifying content may indeed be unique, but they aren’t particularly persistent. That’s why people formed the International DOI Foundation. A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) uniquely identifies an item of intellectual property on the internet. It sticks with the item, so that if the network location of the item changes (as often happens on the internet), the item can still be found.

So what sort of intellectual properties can be identified by a DOI? According to the International DOI Foundation, pretty much all kinds:

“DOIs can be used to identify, for example, text, audio, images, software, etc; and in future could be used to identify the agreements and parties involved. While the scope of intellectual property transactions is quite broad, it is unlikely that DOIs would be appropriate for identifying entities such as people or natural objects or trucks unless they are involved in such a transaction. Intellectual property transactions don’t necessarily involve money: DOIs can be used to identify free materials and transactions as well as entities of commercial value.”

An auxiliary institution, CrossRef, maintains a doi-to-URL database so you can pull up a digitally identified object in your browser window, as long as it’s research content and not a truck or a mountain that was involved in an intellectual property transaction.

DOIs are used to identify individual articles in research publications. Nature Publishing explains how in their Q&A on DOIs:

DOI Numbers Q&A at Nature Publishing

More DOI info from Nature, including how to cite papers by DOI
The International DOI Foundation page on DOIs
Digital object identifier in Wikipedia
CrossRef