DataCite and DOI

DataCite is a non-profit organisation formed in London on the 1st of December 2009. The aim is to:

  • Establish easier access to research data on the Internet
  • Increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scholarly record
  • Support data archiving that will permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study
  • Provide help on citing data
  • Support publishers to link research data and research papers

Research data are stored in research community based repositories or institutional repositories. 

DataCite indexes metadata and DOI. 

digital object identifier (DOI) is a character string used to uniquely identify an object such as an electronic document. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found. The DOI for a document remains fixed over the lifetime of the document, whereas its location and other metadata may change.

The repositories are responsible for data preservation and making the data accessible.