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DOI ○꠹｜Definition｜1st｜20260905164447-00-⌔

Digital object identifier - Wikipedia

Digital object identifier

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A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier, or persistent handle, used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).1 DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System;23 they also fit within the URI system (Uniform Resource Identifier). They are widely used to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications.

A DOI aims to resolve to its target, the information object to which the DOI refers. This is achieved by binding the DOI to metadata about the object, such as a URL where the object is located. Thus, by being actionable and interoperable, a DOI differs from ISBNs or ISRCs which are identifiers only. The DOI system uses the indecs Content Model to represent metadata.

The DOI for a document remains fixed over the lifetime of the document, whereas its location and other metadata may change. Referring to an online document by its DOI should provide a more stable link than directly using its URL, but if its URL changes, the publisher must update the metadata for the DOI to maintain the link to the URL.456 It is the publisher’s responsibility to update the DOI database. If they fail to do so, the DOI resolves to a dead link, leaving the DOI useless.7

The developer and administrator of the DOI system is the International DOI Foundation (IDF), which introduced it in 2000.8 Organizations that meet the contractual obligations of the DOI system and are willing to pay to become a member of the system can assign DOIs.9 The DOI system is implemented through a federation of registration agencies coordinated by the IDF.10 The cumulative number of DOIs has increased exponentially over time, from 50 million registrations in 2011 to 391 million in 2025.11 The rate of registering organizations (“members”) has also increased over time from 4,000 in 2011 to 9,500 in 2013, but the federated nature of the system means it is not immediately clear how many members there are in total today.12 Fake registries have even appeared.13

Printed 2026-09-05.

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Footnotes

  1. “ISO 26324:2012(en), Information and documentation – Digital object identifier system”. ISO. Archived from the original on 17 June 2016. Retrieved 20 April 2016. ↩

  2. “The Handle System”. Handle.Net Registry. Archived from the original on 7 January 2023. ↩

  3. “Resources (including Factsheets)”. DOI. Archived from the original on 25 December 2022. ↩

  4. Witten, Ian H.; Bainbridge, David & Nichols, David M. (2010). How to Build a Digital Library (2nd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann. pp. 352–253. ISBN 978-0-12-374857-7. ↩

  5. Langston, Marc; Tyler, James (2004). “Linking to Journal Articles in an Online Teaching Environment: The Persistent Link, DOI, and OpenURL”. The Internet and Higher Education. 7 (1): 51–58. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2003.11.004. ↩

  6. “How the”Digital Object Identifier”Works”. BusinessWeek. 23 July 2001. Archived from the original on 2 October 2010. Retrieved 20 April 2010. Assuming the publishers do their job of maintaining the databases, these centralized references, unlike current web links, should never become outdated or broken ↩

  7. Liu, Jia (2021). “Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship”. Journal of eScience Librarianship. 10 (2) e1180. doi:10.7191/jeslib.2021.1180. ↩

  8. Paskin, Norman (2010), “Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System”, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), Taylor and Francis, pp. 1586–1592 ↩

  9. Davidson, Lloyd A.; Douglas, Kimberly (December 1998). “Digital Object Identifiers: Promise and problems for scholarly publishing”. Journal of Electronic Publishing. 4 (2). doi:10.3998/3336451.0004.203. ↩

  10. “Welcome to the DOI System”. DOI. 28 June 2010. Archived from the original on 13 August 2010. Retrieved 7 August 2010. ↩

  11. “What is a DOI?”. DOI Foundation. Archived from the original on 17 August 2023. Retrieved 6 February 2025. ↩

  12. “Who are the Members & Users?”. DOI. Archived from the original on 23 January 2025. Retrieved 6 February 2025. “DOI News, April 2011: 1. DOI System exceeds 50 million assigned identifiers”. DOI. 20 April 2011. Archived from the original on 27 July 2011. Retrieved 3 July 2011. ↩

  13. “Important Alerts”. DOI. Archived from the original on 11 November 2024. Retrieved 11 November 2024. ↩

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