The DOI: a permanent address for research that only works if publishers maintain it
Web addresses break all the time, which is a problem for scholarship built on citations. The digital object identifier, or DOI, gives each paper, dataset or report a fixed name that points to wherever it currently lives. Registrations climbed from 50 million in 2011 to 391 million by 2025.
The International DOI Foundation launched the system in 2000, and it is now an ISO standard. A DOI is a short string in two halves split by a slash. The prefix begins with 10, marking it as part of the DOI namespace, followed by a number identifying the registrant; the suffix is whatever the registrant picks for the item. In 10.1000/182, for example, 1000 is the foundation itself and 182 is the latest DOI Handbook. Letters are read without regard to case.
Unlike an ISBN, which merely labels a book, a DOI is actionable. It is bound to metadata, including the current location of the object, and a resolver quietly redirects anyone who looks it up. The name deliberately encodes nothing that might change, such as owner or location. But the promise of permanence depends on people: if a publisher moves an article and forgets to update the record, the DOI leads nowhere, and when a journal changes hands its DOIs are sometimes all replaced.
The identifiers can be as coarse or as fine as the assigner wants, naming a whole journal, one issue, one article or even a single table. They cover far more than papers. Crossref, a consortium of around 3,000 publishers, handles scholarly work; DataCite handles research data; the Entertainment ID Registry tags films and TV edits; and the OECD gives every table and chart in its publications its own DOI leading to the underlying spreadsheet. Since 2015, internet standards documents called RFCs have had them too.
Even the display format is disputed. The official handbook says to write the doi: prefix, while Crossref urges printing a full web address so readers can paste it; citation styles are split, with AMA following the handbook and APA, MLA and Chicago using the web form. Librarians have also complained that DOIs often steer readers to paywalled copies when free ones exist elsewhere.
Source: Digital object identifier
