Figure 270958: DOE Data ID Service 250 logo
Since 2008, OSTI has been helping DOE researchers and the public find DOE scientific research data collections through the DOE Data Explorer (DDE). Then, in 2011, OSTI began offering a service enabling DOE researchers to obtain digital object identifiers (DOIs) for individual datasets, and the DDE database began including those individual items as well. But, until recently, the DOE Data ID Service that assigns and registers those DOIs to datasets did not have an OSTI web page of its own.
In November 2015, to increase the DOI registration service's visibility and utility, OSTI launched a new DOE Data ID Service microsite. The site provides information on how the DOE Data ID Service came into existence, the benefits of registering datasets for DOIs, and a full explanation of how the registration process works. The microsite is accessible on the OSTI homepage under the "Science Search Tools" menu tab, and it also is highlighted on a slide in the homepage carousel featuring OSTI's products and services.
Through the DOE Data ID Service, OSTI assigns DOIs to datasets submitted by DOE and its contractor or grantee researchers and registers the DOIs with DataCite to aid in citation, discovery, and retrieval. OSTI is an active member of DataCite, an international organization that supports data visibility, ease of data citation in scholarly publications, data preservation and future re-use, and data access and retrievability.
The Data ID Service is a useful tool for increasing access to digital data, as the DOE Public Access Plan noted: "The Department's Office of Scientific and Technical Information can provide digital object identifiers to datasets resulting from DOE-funded research. To improve the discoverability of and attribution for datasets created and used in the course of the research, DOE encourages the citation and identification of datasets with persistent identifiers such as DOIs."
The most prolific data submitter to OSTI during the 2015 fiscal year was the Materials Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Professor Gerbrand Ceder and Dr. Kristin Persson founded the project, which allows experimental research depending on in-depth knowledge of the properties of materials to progress much more quickly. Using the power of supercomputing and state-of-the-art electronic structure methods, the datasets in the Materials Project repository provide 3-D structural models and detailed analyses. More than 16,000 of these datasets were registered with DOIs through the DOE Data ID Service in FY 2015.
The DOE Data ID Service is available to DOE lab and grantee researchers, and it accommodates both manual and automatic submissions. OSTI provides this free data registration service to enhance DOE's management of this important resource. OSTI, the only U.S. government member of DataCite, also can assign DOIs to other federal agencies' datasets on a cost-reimbursable basis. Please check out the new DOE Data ID Service microsite, and let us know if you would like to see your data become more visible, cited in scholarly publications, and easier to identify and access for tomorrow's future researchers.