DOI (Document Object Identifier)

The following description is taken from http://www.std-doi.de/front_content.php: DOIs aim at making primary scientific data citeable as publications. A data set would be attributed to its investigators as authors like it would be done for a work in the conventional scientific literature. Thus, scientific primary data should not exclusively understood as part of a scientific publication, but may have its own identity. To make primary scientific data citeable as publications, several organizational and technical pre-conditions have to be met:

• Quality control of the primary data set by the author and by the data publishing agency,
• Quality control of the descriptive metadata set by the author and by the data publishing agency
• Long-term availability of the published data in an online reporsitory
• Search function for data publications in library catalogues
• Access to the primary data with assignment of a persistent identifier and resolver system (DOI resolver)

Data intended for publication must meet the criteria stated above. Published data must be openly accessible and cannot be modified, like articles in scientific literature.

The size of the data sets used in a scientific publication often prohibits their publication as data tables and, as a result, data used as the basis of a publication are rarely published anymore. The lack of access to scientific data is an obstacle to interdisciplinary and international research. DOIs together with their bibliographical information provide the opportunity to find and to cite primary data in scientific publications. A citation of a data set follows the classical citation rules in scientific literature, e.g. author(s), publication year, data set name, persistent identifier. An example: Nozawa, Toru (2004): IPCC-DDC_CCSRNIES_SRES_B2: 211 YEARS MONTHLY MEANS, National Institute for Environmental Studies and Center for Climate System Research Japan, WDCC. doi:10.1594/WDCC/CCSRNIES_SRES_B2.

Notes

• FCGZ DOIs will have the following prefix: 10.5077
• DOI for projects have the suffix: fgcz-pXXX (where XXX is the project id)
• fgcz DOI webaccess: fgcz-doi.uzh.ch
• Summery: the DOI Link will look like this example: http://fgcz-doi.uzh.ch/10.5077/fgcz-p403 and it will be redirected to http://fgcz-bfabric.uzh.ch/bfabric/userlab/show-project.html?projectId=403

Apache Config

• Apache2 conf:

  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
          RewriteEngine On
          RewriteOptions inherit
          RewriteRule     ^/+10.5077/+fgcz-p(\d+)$        http://fgcz-bfabric.uzh.ch/bfabric/userlab/show-project.html?projectId=$1       [R,L]
          RewriteRule     ^/$     http://www.doi.ethz.ch/ [R,L]
  </IfModule>

• Technically: rewrite link
  • Apache Doc
  • mod_rewrite
  • mod_alias

Questions

• How should the FGCZ DOIs look like, e.g., fgcz-p00000? -> define mapping between the B-Fabric URL and DOI
• DOI for which objects (granularity of DOIs)? -> see discussion below
• Who is allowed to request a DOI?
• At which point of time should a DOI be requested/needed?
• Does DOI make sense for unpublished data? In todays way of thinking, since only papers published on a conference or journal count, researchers do not want to publish their scientific data before the paper is published. However, the paper reviewers shall get access to the data. When DOIs are used for this purpose, its definition must be adapted.

DOI Project Level

Discussion:

• User: usefull?
• User: publication time?

Pro

• Dev: easy to implement

Con

DOI Workunit Level

Discussion

• Dev: visibility of transitive closure?
• Dev: grouping needed for easy handling of many workunits (e.g. 10000 WU)?

Pro

• Dev: easy to implement

Con

• Dev: grouping needed
• Dev: access rights, fine grained access model needed

DOI on other levels?