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Digital Object Identifiers

The Brown Digital Repository is pleased to offer the ability to mint Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for members of the Brown Community.

What is a DOI?

A doi is a Digital Object Identifier. (To clarify: this is a digital identifier for an object.)

  • Objects can be physical, digital, or abstract.
  • A doi provides an actionable, interoperable, and persistent link
Example

The following is an example of a DOI that resolves to a digital film stored in the BDR:

10.7301/Z0WD3XH9

Benefits for Your Research Product

Some benefits of getting a DOI for your research product:

  • Discovery and Attribution: It allows you to create a persistent identifier for your research products (datasets, animations, videos, digital publications, software code, data dictionaries, visualizations, etc.), which is especially useful for locating and citing the digital research products that you have published on the Web. DOIs allow you the ability to cite your own research products in your publications, so that others may better discover them and then provide you with proper attribution in their scholarship. For example, if you write a research article, and you want to cite the dataset and analysis code that you used to get the results described in your paper, then you can get DOIs for your data and code and cite these with their DOIs in your article. Your readers will then be able to use these DOIs to locate your data and your analysis code on the Web.

  • Flexibility: A DOI is especially helpful for allowing you to get a citation for your research products quickly. But DOIs also allow you the flexibility to later update your location information for your research products if you ever have to move them to a new place, without changing the DOI itself.

  • Impact: Having a DOI will help others to discover, use, and create a persistent citation for referencing and/or using your digital research products published on the Web, allowing you to use Web tools such as ImpactStory, Google Scholar, Google Analytics, etc. to measure the impact of your research products published on the Web. You can use these tools to help you collect analytics to visualize how and how often your digital research products are being discovered and used by others.

  • Scientific Integrity: Being able to read a scholarly publication, access the underlying data and analysis code used to obtain the results reported in the publication, allows researchers to successfully reproduce research and/or experiments, a fundamental value of scholarship and science.

Who can request a DOI?

All students, faculty, and staff may request a DOI for digital assets produced via the scholarly, instructional, research, and administrative activities at Brown.