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Digital object identifier

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Professional Psychology: Debating Chamber · Psychology Journals · Psychologists

A digital object identifier (or DOI) is a standard for persistently identifying a piece of intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with related current data, the metadata, in a structured extensible way.

DOIs have been called "the bar code for intellectual property": like the physical barcode, they are enabling tools for use all through the supply chain to add value and save cost. A DOI differs from commonly used internet pointers to material such as the URL because it identifies an object as a first-class entity, not simply the place where the object is located.

The DOI identifies an entity directly, not some attribute of an object (an address is an attribute of a thing, whereas the thing itself is a first class object). A DOI also differs from commonly used identifiers of intellectual property such as standard bibliographic and related identifiers (ISBN, ISRC, etc) because it can be associated with defined services and is immediately actionable on a network.

A DOI can apply to any form of intellectual property expressed in any digital environment. Intellectual property includes both physical and digital manifestations, performances and abstract works: DOIs can be used to identify texts, images, audio or video items, software, etc. An entity can be identified at any arbitrary level of granularity. This means that, for instance, DOIs can identify a journal, an individual issue of a journal, an individual article in the journal, or a single table in that article.

DOI Structure Edit

The DOI consists of a unique alphanumeric character string divided in two parts: a prefix and a suffix.

For example, a complete DOI is:



10.1000 is the prefix, composed by a part identifying the string as a DOI (10) and a part identifying the registrant (1000);
182 is the suffix, identifying the single object.


Resolution Edit





The DOI organization has applied for a "doi:" URI scheme to allow a DOI to be expressed as a URI without requiring reference to a specific HTTP server as above. [citation needed] To date, this has not been approved.

Metadata Edit


Metadata, as well as the DOI they are associated to, are persistently connected to the object they describe, so they can be easily communicated to other subject across the productive and distributive chain, enhancing a content producer's ability to trade electronically. Furthermore, metadata represent the key for the development of DOI-based services, such as transnational databases and search engines for different kinds of contents. Asserting that metadata are persistent does not mean saying they are unmodifiable: registrants may update metadata about their contents any time they wish (whether some publication data change, when is modified the primary URL the DOI resolves to, etc.).

International DOI Foundation (IDF) Edit



DOI Registration Agencies Edit


Currently, seven major RAs are active worldwide:

Advantages of DOIs Edit

There are three main values granted by DOI adoption:

  • Persistent Identification: each DOI univocally and permanently identifies the object which is associated to
  • Semantic Interoperability: metadata allow to unambiguously communicate - to any user, from any place, at any point of the productive/distributive chain - all the pieces of information about the related objects and the hierarchical relationships among them

See also Edit

See Template:Doi for the usage of "Digital object identifier" in Wikipedia.

External linksEdit

Registration Agencies Edit

da:Digital object identifier de:Digital Object Identifier fr:Digital Object Identifiernl:Digital object identifierno:Digital object identifier vi:DOI


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