Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are unique ids applied to digital items (files, sites, documents) that allow for persistent linking to that online item. Since a DOI never changes - and is resolvable through a URL - a DOI for an item will always lead a user to the place where that item resides. In terms of our use of Open Journal Systems (OJS) here at UNB, a DOI can be assigned to the following:
- journals
- journal issues
- individual journal articles
- individual journal galleys (wherein the PDF and HTML galley have separate DOIs)
- supplementary files
Typically, DOIs are only assigned to individual articles.
DOIs allow for easy linking to citations across publishers and organizations. They are increasingly common in academic journal publication, particularly with the sciences. They also allow journals to - with the help of DOI registration agencies - provide important metrics regarding individual publications. That said, a DOI by itself is fairly useless if it has not been registered with a DOI registration agency.
There are a number of DOI registration agencies depending on geography or publication focus. For the purposes of our installation of OJS, the only registration agency that matters is Crossref. This is because Crossref is considered to be the official link registration service for scholarly and professional publications. Crossref have extensive documentation if you should be in the unenviable position of having to sort out a Crossref problem. You can also email their support line and they will pretty quickly help you out. They're nice, in my limited experience.
Here's a DOI from Atlantic Geology:
10.4138/atlgeol.2013.001
DOIs are broken into two distinct parts, prefix and suffix. A prefix for a DOI is static. A journal might have their own, or a publisher might have their own. This part of the DOI never changes. Take, for example, the DOI for Atlantic Geology:
10.4138
This part of their DOIs will always be the same. However, the second part will change for every article, and will be unique to that article (it won't be found anywhere else in our install of OJS).
atlgeol.2013.001
DOIs allow for the possibility to link to any file with a registered URL. So, if a DOI has been registered with Crossref, you can turn any DOI into a URL. You simply prepend the following...
... to your DOI. A complete link looks like so:
http://dx.doi.org/10.4138/atlgeol.2013.001
The idea is that if you change the placement or filepath of the file, you can update that URL with Crossref and the DOI will still always take users to the article. It becomes a persistent way to link out to the content. That is valuable for lots of reasons I won't bother going into here.
Our workflow for DOIs is pretty straight-forward. Since we only have two journals that use it and these journals are both geology journals AND these journals both have unique publication methods (one publishes their content iteratively and the other publishes with pre-prints and finished copies), this is a good thing.
I should point out that there's a good chance this workflow will change and probably a good chance that it will change within the next year thanks to OJS updates and a changing relationship between PKP and Crossref.
This is done on the Metadata page for an individual article in OJS. There are a few ways to get to there.
- User Home
- Editor for the relevant journal
- Find the article either in In Review or In Editing
- Click on the Title of that article
- Click either the Summary or Editing subheadings
- Click either the Edit Metadata or Review Metadata links
- Scroll down to the DOI section and input only the suffix for that article into the field.
This is a unique situation, because for our two journals, our editors will actually mostly be doing this themselves. It is your job, however, to make sure that content isn't published with that DOI field left blank. If it is, that might be problematic. Stay vigilant!
Once the issue is published (or if it is a Future Issue), you may want to (as Editor) go into the issue and enter the suffixes as the "public_ID" for relevant articles. This changes part of the URL in OJS to have the DOI prefix and suffix included.
*This isn't strictly necessary for any real reason, but we seem to do it regardless.
Follow previous patterns for displaying DOIs in your detailed Markup. Any article from Atlantic Geology or Geoscience Canada from the last year should have an example of how we display those situations. It is well established.
This requires a regular expression and craftiness... stay tuned.
As I mentioned earlier, DOIs need to be registered to be of any use to anyone. Putting http://dx.doi.org/ in front of your DOI will not create a link if the DOI hasn't been registered. Any journal we work with is on the hook for having their own DOI account and prefix.
Registering a DOI is, currently, a three-stop process. It starts once an article with a DOI has been published. It's like this:
OJS can export metadata in the Crossref metadata standard for you. Do this:
- User Home
- Journal Manager
- System Plugins
- Import/Export Plugins
- Crossref XML Export Plugin (Click on "Import/Export Data" Link directly below)
- Select Issue or Article Export, depending on what you're up to.
- Check off the boxes for what you're exporting, click on Export below.
- Save to whatever directory.
The XML might need adjusting. This happens occasionally. It's usually not a big deal. Open up the XML in Oxygen or any other editor that does validation. If something is wrong, check it out. It's possible that you might have to cull some unnecessary elements (you'll know because they have giant red lines under them).
*For example: right now, there's a bug where OJS is adding slots for supplementary files to have metadata and DOIs in the Crossref Export. This is inappropriate, because our journals don't actually even have DOIs for their supplementary files. When you make the file currently (like, November 2013), there will be an element called
<component_list>that is showing as invalid. You can delete it entirely, because we're not submitting these to Crossref. This is just one example of the sort of thing you might see in this situation.
Right now, we have to do this manually. It's possible that journal editors might also be able to do this if they are in the mood. There is talk that OJS may be able to do this on it's own sooner than later. It's pretty straight forward.
- Go to Crossref's backend for submission.
- Login as the Required Journal
- Click the "Submissions" tab
- Click "Choose File" and select your valid crossref.xml file
- Make sure that the "type" is set to "Metadata"
- Click "upload"
And that's it. Shortly thereafter, James (probably) will get an email saying whether or not the upload was a success. If it was, you're all set! If not, you'll have to resubmit after sorting out why the upload failed.
And that's it!
You should now that submitting a DOI for registration costs a journal $1 per thing you upload. You might be initially concerned that messing up will cost the money, but resubmissions don't cost anything. Back-issue uploads cost $0.15 per article. It is unlikely that you will see this, but it's important.
Should a file have to move to a new URL for any reason, the DOI will have to be updated with Crossref. You can do this by resubmitting it. Editors should be made aware of this fact as well.