DOI Minting and Resolution

DOI Minting

DOIs can be minted in 2 ways, automated through the DataCite DOI API(s) or manually via the DataCite Fabrica interface.

DataCite schema mandatory elements

As of version 4.0 of the DataCite Metadata Schema, the mandatory set of information that needs to be passed through to mint a DOI is:

URL - The URL for the landing page of the dataset. (Passed as a parameter and not part of the XML metadata)
Title - A name or title by which a resource is known.
Creators - The main researchers involved in producing the data, or the authors of the publication, in priority order.
Publisher - The holder of the data (including archives as appropriate) or institution that submitted the work.
Publication Year - The year when the data was or will be made publicly available.
ResourceType (with mandatory general type description sub property) - A description of the resource.

Consortium Organisations will be required to provide the 'resourceType' metadata element when minting DOIs for grey literature with Schema versions earlier than 4.0 (e.g. v3.1).

An XML example of DataCite metadata can be found in the DataCite Schema XML Example section of this document.

Once a DOI has been minted, DataCite will give public access to the XML metadata associated with the DOI via a publicly accessible service point.

ARDC does not update the information stored with DOIs which have been minted through the ARDC DOI service. This is the responsibility of the client that minted the DOI.

DOI Resolution

All DOIs must be associated with a resolvable URL pointing to a landing page for the data being identified. This means that resolving DOIs is as simple as prefixing the DOI with the DOI System's resolution service address (https://doi.org/) in a browser address bar e.g. https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.726855.

Note that as of July 2018 DataCite is no longer registering test DOIs in the global Handle System. This means that test DOIs will no longer be resolvable. The main reason for this change is to prevent handles being orphaned after the test DOIs are deleted.

It is important to understand that the Handle System (the technical infrastructure for DOIs) is a distributed network system. The consequence of this is inherent latency. DOIs have TTL (time to live) defaulted to 24 hours, so any changes will be visible to the resolution infrastructure only when the TTL expires.