DOE OSTI launched the Award DOI Service on September 29, 2020. The service is designed to support global identification of DOE awards and help promote acknowledgement, citation, discovery, and reuse of DOE research and development (R&D) information. This new service was developed as a pilot project working with DOE national laboratories to assign digital object identifiers (DOIs) to awards provided by laboratory user facilities. In the future, the service will allow DOE funding offices, national laboratories, and additional user facilities to assign DOIs to awards, grants, and contracts, among others. DOIs help facilitate linkages among research objects. With this new service, awards can be part of those linkages; the metadata for research outputs can include DOIs for the relevant awards, illustrating the connections between the research objects and the awards.

The Award DOI Service provides a web interface and an Application Programming Interface (API) for award DOI registration. OSTI collects relevant metadata required to obtain award DOIs and passes that metadata to Crossref (link is external), a DOI registration agency, to be registered globally through the International DOI Foundation (link is external).

DOIs have long been a standard for persistent identification of research objects, such as journal articles, research reports, datasets, and other publications. In 2019, Crossref extended their service to include DOI registration for awards with their Grant ID Service and metadata schema specifically tailored to capture information relevant to awards. DOE OSTI, as a member of Crossref, is using this mechanism to facilitate DOI assignment in the Award DOI Service.

To learn more, please visit the Award DOI Service. We invite your feedback—all questions, thoughts, and suggestions are welcome. Please contact us at AwardDOIService@osti.gov.