3 ms·

Sorry, but what is DOI?

• afandian 11y ago
  As described in the blog post (although not fully). A DOI is a Digital Object Identifier. A digital object is something like a scholarly article. People need to be able to find it by URL, cite it, and refer to it with an ID. The URL is no good because it could change. If you cite a URL and it 404s in a few years time, that's link rot. So a DOI is a link that points to the item. It 'belongs' to the publisher who owns the article. They are obliged to update the link to point to the new location when it moves. Hence the DOI link always (in theory) works. From a user's perspective, a DOI is just a URL that you visit that redirects you to a different URL. From inside, it's a link resolver system backed by a database that publishers keep updated through a registration agency (e.g. Crossref). Different Registration Agencies do different things. Crossref has a tonne of metadata, contributed by publishers. Have a play here: http://api.crossref.org/works http://api.crossref.org/works There's a good Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier