What is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)?
A digital object identifier is a persistent identifier for an intellectual object such as a journal article in an electronic environment. Ultimately, as the DOI system matures, the DOI will be a clickable link similar to a URL, but will link to an object (e.g., a journal article) rather than a location (e.g., American Chemical Society). The numbering system for the DOI consists of two parts, the prefix and the suffix, separated by a forward slash, e.g. prefix/suffix. The prefix is assigned by the DOI system to an organization that wishes to register, such as a publisher (All DOIs begin with 10).
A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a unique permanent identifier given to an electronic document. DOIs do not change and they are associated with information about the document, such as the title, authors, topics etc. The DOI that ConserveOnline issues is deposited in a central directory of DOIs of scholarly and research content. This directory is maintained by CrossRef (www.crossref.org), a not-for-profit network founded on publisher collaboration, with a mandate to make reference linking throughout online scholarly literature efficient and reliable. Other publishers and librarians can then link to those DOIs, greatly increasing the visibility of your documents to search engines.
