The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) Award DOI Service allows DOE funding offices, national laboratories, and user facilities to request digital object identifiers (DOIs) for awards, contracts, equipment, facilities, grants, prizes, salary awards, time awarded, and training grants. DOIs are persistent identifiers that facilitate the acknowledgement, citation, discovery, and reuse of information. DOIs are also recognized globally as a way to uniquely identify research objects such as awards, publications, datasets, software, and reports. DOIs are resolvable to a landing page that includes information (metadata) describing the research object. This service was developed based on feedback from the DOE community to provide a mechanism for persistent and global identification of DOE awards.
In 2005, DOE OSTI became a member of Crossref and began assigning DOIs to technical reports resulting from DOE-funded research to facilitate citing, accessing, and reusing publicly available scientific technical reports. Crossref is a not-for-profit member organization and DOI registration agency with the International DOI Foundation. In 2019, Crossref began offering a service assigning DOIs to awards, which include funding types such as awards, contracts, equipment, facilities, grants, prizes, salary awards, time awarded, and training grants. The Crossref service provides a metadata schema specifically tailored to capture information relevant to awards. Award DOIs can be assigned early in the research workflow allowing for downstream use by including the award DOI in acknowledgements, for collection by publishers, or in metadata collected about research objects resulting from the award. DOE OSTI is using the Crossref service to facilitate DOI assignment in the Award DOI Service.
DOE OSTI, a unit of the Office of Science, fulfills agency-wide responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate both unclassified and research outputs emanating from DOE-funded research and development (R&D) activities at DOE national laboratories and facilities and at universities and other institutions nationwide. OSTI provides access to DOE-funded research outputs through a suite of web-based, searchable discovery tools and through other commonly used search engines, offering ever-expanding sources of R&D information to DOE, the research community, and the science-attentive public.