About

About Award DOI Service

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.


Benefits of Using an Award DOI

  • Award DOIs provide a way for researchers to reference supporting organizations so that funding offices, national laboratories, and user facilities receive proper attribution for the awards they have issued.
  • DOIs provide a mechanism for awards to be referenced in a standardized format, as DOIs have become a familiar mechanism resolving to important information describing research objects.
  • DOIs facilitate linkages among research objects. Awards can be linked to research outputs. When research outputs (journal articles, datasets, software, etc.) receive DOIs from publishers, OSTI’s other DOI services, or through other mechanisms, the metadata for the research output can also include the award DOI, illustrating the connection between the research object and the award.
  • These persistent links between awards and research outputs enable funding offices, national laboratories, and user facilities to more easily track the impact of their support.
  • DOIs are designed to be more stable and persistent links than normal URLs. Registering the DOI with a registering agency such as Crossref provides global resolution and the prospect of steadily increasing visibility of awards and related research outputs.
For more information about how to use the Award DOI Service, please see the Award DOI Service Help, or contact AwardDOIService@osti.gov with questions.

Award DOI Service Background

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.


About DOE OSTI

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.