DOIs for Tracking and Citing Scientific Data

Peter Loewe

Authors: Jens Klump, Joachim Wächter, and Michael Lautenschlager*

GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany
and *Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Hamburg, Germany

Intensive research in the earth sciences over the past decades has created a tremendous wealth of literature, data, and material collections. So far, literature, data and sample collections have been separated. Information technology and the internet, in particular the new cyberinfrastructures for the earth sciences, offer ways to interlink literature, data and samples, creating the potential for new interpretations of the data and materials beyond the interpretation already published in the literature. To achieve this, technical, editorial and custodial issues need to be resolved. A key to this is the use of persistent identifiers for literature, data and sample collection objects. Past experience has shown that URLs are transient, but systems of persistent identifiers (e.g. handle.net, DOI, URN) already exist and can be used to reference these objects.

The project ‘Publication and citation of scientific primary data’ (STD-DOI) shows prototypically how these criteria can be met and implements a system for the publication of scientific data, which is open to the scientific community in any scientific field. This project uses persistent identifiers (DOI, handle.net and URN) to identify datasets available in a digital format. The identifier is resolved to the valid location (URL) where the this dataset can be found. In addition, the data publications may be included into the catalogue of the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). Data at finer granularity are only identified by generic handle.net IDs, not by DOIs.

Keywords: data management, persistent identifier