DOIs allow people to more easily discover research objects, access them, and reuse them for verification of the original experiment or to produce new results with the latest methods.

DOIs facilitate linkages among outputs — published articles, patents, technical reports, scientific data, scientific software, and other research outputs.

DOIs are easy to cite in a standardized way to give inventors, authors, or creators the proper attribution.

DOIs can be assigned to any digital entity a user wishes to persistently identify, primarily for sharing with an interested user community or managing as intellectual property. DOI links are “persistent”. That is, DOIs resolve to a URL that can be updated even if domain names change and/or the domain naming system itself is replaced. This characteristic can be helpful to agencies as they often undergo reorganizations and renaming. A DOI can ensure the long-term integrity of identifiers in these situations.

DOIs are cross-disciplinary — used in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences and in several communities that frequently interact with the scholarly literature, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), patent systems, and standards bodies.

DOIs help make scientific data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Specifically, DOIs help make scientific data findable. See the FAIR Data Principles for a more detailed explanation of FAIR.

OSTI is a member of DataCite, which gives us the ability to assign DOIs to scientific data. OSTI became a member of DataCite in 2010 to facilitate citing, accessing, and reusing publicly available scientific data produced by DOE-funded researchers. DataCite is an international not-for-profit organization that supports data visibility, ease of data citation in scholarly publications, data preservation and future re-use, and data access and retrievability.

DataCite employs a metadata schema that allows for the description of scientific data. DOE OSTI collects relevant metadata required to assign a DOI and passes that metadata on to DataCite allowing for a DOI to be registered by DataCite and globally through the DOI Foundation.

DataCite is a registration agency of the DOI Foundation, allowing DataCite DOIs to be registered internationally, giving them global recognition and persistence.

OSTI provides two options for obtaining a DOI for scientific data funded by the Department of Energy:

• A Web Submission Interface through E-Link for obtaining DOIs for scientific data. As OSTI does not maintain a data repository, only the metadata describing your scientific data, including a publicly facing landing page URL hosted outside of OSTI, will be submitted through the Web Submission Interface. This option is recommended for low-volume submitters.
• The E-Link Application Programming Interface (API) for obtaining DOIs for scientific data. The API can be accessed using a wide variety of clients (Postman; HTTP Requestor; Restlet API, RESTED, etc.). This option is recommended for high-volume submitters.

Researchers from DOE national laboratories should contact their site's STI Manager to arrange for manual submission. Work with the Data Liaison by emailing DOEDataID@osti.gov, who will then set up a meeting to go through each step of manually submitting.

OSTI prepares a new scientific data submitter for the Web Submission Interface by:

1. Creating a site code in E-Link
2. Assigning a unique DOI prefix to a user's submissions
3. Setting up the connection with DataCite to allow for DOI registration
4. Providing instructions on E-Link account registration

Financial Assistance recipients (Grantees) can submit metadata for their individual scientific data records through E-Link by registering for an account at https://www.osti.gov/user/register?appname=ELINK.

For more information about manual submission please refer to the E-Link Help page.

Please refer to E-Link's API Documentation. If you have questions or issues, please contact DOEDataID@osti.gov for assistance.

DOE Minimum Required Fields:

• Title: Full title of the scientific data, with version numbers and date ranges if applicable.
• Abstract/Description: Provide a clear, concise, and publicly releasable English language summary of the scientific data. Note: Only required for financial assistance recipient records, although highly recommended for DOE lab records.
• Author/Contributor: A listing of the authors/contributors to the scientific data. Affiliations and ORCID iDs can be added if known. If a contributor is listed, the contributor type must be specified.
• Publication Date: The scientific data publication date, in MM/DD/YYYY, YYYY, or YYYY Month format.
• Publicly Facing Landing Page URL: Full URL to the landing page for the scientific data.
• DOE Contract/Grant Number(s): Primary DOE contract/grant number(s).
• Dataset Product Number(s): The most important identifying numbers given to the scientific data by the host or originating organization. Enter None if there are no product numbers.
• Originating Research Organization: The organization name primarily responsible for conducting the research.
• Sponsoring Organization: The organization name that sponsored/ funded the research.
• Contact Information: Name, phone number, and email address of a contact person for this scientific data record. This is for internal use only and will not be displayed publicly.

Please note that in addition to the required fields, there are several optional fields available to increase the findability of scientific data records.

Once a metadata record is successfully submitted without errors, a DOI will be assigned and registered within minutes.

No, the scientific data does not need to be accessible to the public if there are access limitation reasons; however, a publicly available landing page providing metadata about the scientific data and describing the data availability is required. Most scientific data that is DOE-funded must be made publicly available (especially scientific data underlying scholarly publications), per DOE O 241.1C and Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP) requirements, so please refer to those documents for more information. Note: E-Link only allows the submission of Unlimited scientific data records, so if the scientific data is CUI, it cannot be submitted. Certain scientific data can have embargo periods or copyright restrictions, at which point data access/availability should be described on the landing page.

Yes. Creating a unique DOI infix allows you to add intelligence to a DOI and identify a specific project, instrument, research group, etc.  

If you are using the API, use the infix API tag: "doi_infix" with the specific desired DOI infix.

• Example: "doi_infix": "MyProjectName"

If you are using the Web Submission Interface, enter your infix in the DOI Infix field:

Example DOI featuring an infix: 10.1234/MyProject/123456

If no DOI infix is submitted, the resulting DOI will look like this: 10.1234/123456.

As part of the free service DOE OSTI provides to DOE-funded scientific data records, an unlimited number of DOIs can be registered. Please notify DOE OSTI at DOEDataID@osti.gov if you plan to register many thousands of DOIs at once, so that OSTI can provide guidance on submitting large volumes of scientific data records.

No, DOIs should link to a publicly facing landing page, which is a webpage that provides additional information describing the scientific data, such as a full bibliographic citation, the DOI, title, abstract, submission/creation date, keywords, authors, and funding information. On the landing page, a link to the scientific data should be provided. If the scientific data becomes deprecated, the landing page should be updated to a tombstone page, which states why the scientific data is no longer available, while keeping the DOI persistent.

Yes, a DOI is persistent, but the scientific data record itself and the associated metadata may be updated at any time. The only metadata field that cannot be updated is the infix, which is a part of the DOI. Once assigned, the DOI itself cannot be updated.

A DOI is persistent. Once registered and made public with DataCite, it cannot be deleted. If no other alternatives are viable, OSTI can “hide” a DOI so it will not appear in OSTI search tools and DataCite's search. Although this is an option, it is not recommended, since DOIs are supposed to be persistent. However, if you or someone else knows the exact DOI, it will resolve to the landing page. If you wish to hide a DOI, please contact OSTI at DOEDataID@osti.gov and specify the OSTI ID, DOI, and the reason for hiding the DOI.

When the scientific data is no longer available for whatever reason, a “tombstone” page needs to be created (or update the current landing page to be a tombstone page) with information on why the scientific data is no longer available. This ensures the DOI remains persistent and that the user has arrived at the correct location.

When a major version change or update occurs to a scientific data record, OSTI recommends registering a new DOI. It is helpful to include a version number or time stamp as a part of the scientific data record's title. This will allow users to correctly index and cite the scientific data. We highly recommend using the Related Identifier metadata field to reference previous version DOIs, as well as express other relationships to a related source (including journal articles associated with the scientific data, other related scientific data DOIs, technical reports, scientific software, etc.).

Related identifiers are a way to connect scientific data DOIs with other research output DOIs (journal articles, technical reports, scientific data, instruments, awards, etc.). OSTI currently supports 66 different DataCite Relation Types (Describes/IsDescribedBy, HasVersion/IsVersionOf, etc.).

No, OSTI does not currently provide data repository services. OSTI hosts the metadata record for scientific data, but OSTI does not provide a repository to store the actual scientific data.

Typically, scientific data is hosted by the associated DOE lab repository or the university's institutional repository, by a DOE project or disciplinary repository, or by a commercial data repository.

Reserved DOIs give the researcher the ability to know what the DOI will be before the scientific data is final/public or before publication. Reserved DOIs are placeholders within the OSTI E-Link ingest system but are not yet registered at DataCite and will therefore not resolve to the landing page URL until submission has been completed.

Once the scientific data is finalized/published, use your OSTI ID to update the metadata appropriately. This will trigger the DOI to be submitted to DataCite for registration.

Yes, you can send minimal metadata; a "title", "product_type" value, and "site_ownership_code" to which the user has appropriate permissions, as a POST. Optionally, you may add a "doi_infix" value if such is desired. POST this metadata to https://www.osti.gov/elink2api/records/save, to reserve your DOI. In the Web Submission Interface, enter placeholder information in the required metadata fields, and click Save. Your reserved DOI will be shown to you when viewing the Metadata Details page.

OSTI provides discovery tools where scientific data records can be discovered. OSTI.GOV is the primary search tool for DOE-funded research results. DOE Data Explorer (DDE) is the search tool for finding DOE-funded scientific data records. OSTI also works with common search engines such as Google, Bing, Google Scholar, and Google Dataset Search to make sure our content is well indexed and discoverable.

Please contact OSTI's Data Team at DOEDataID@osti.gov.