Frictions:DIYDOI
DIY DOI
A brief report on the mechanics of registering a new DOI with the registration agency Crossref, August 2025.
| DIYDOI |
|---|
| Kate Rich |
| DOI: 10.70934/DIYDOI |
| https://doi.org/10.70934/DIYDOI |
- Once set up with an account at Crossref, you receive a DOI prefix, 10.XXXX
- Crossref provides a web deposit form that generates the xml for your DOI.
- Enter the initial metadata here (title, authors, publishers, date etc), and the DOI, which consists of your DOI prefix followed by a suffix which you generate yourself.
- According to Crossref, "Suffixes must be unique, contain numbers and/or letters and -._;()/ are case-insensitive and ideally are short string, easily typed yet “dumb” meaning that they contain no obvious information. A best practice DOI would be 10.3390/s18020479". However we note that many DOI strings do contain information.
- On submitting the form, you will be asked for your Crossref login, and an email address where the deposit results should be sent.
- Note, a DOI string can’t be changed once registered, and DOIs cannot be deleted.
- Once the DOI is confirmed you should then create a landing page for the DOI. For the landing page it's usually enough to add the DOI information (title, author and DOI URL as an html link) at the top of the page of the referenced object, however if the item is a PDF it's advised to make a separate page.
- To add, change, or remove metadata from your existing records, you can resubmit your complete metadata record with the changes included.
- You will also receive a copy of the XML by email. You can also edit and submit the XML instead of re-entering your metadata into the web deposit form.
- As the objects we are digitally identifying in this experiment are not part of a Journal, Conference Proceedings, Book, Dissertation or Crossref Policy page, we need to submit our DOIs as Reports.
- The web deposit form for a report has limited fields, but there is the option to create and upload a .csv document to add additional metadata to an existing DOI (Or multiple DOIs at once) using the supplemental metadata upload option on Crossref.
- The csv form is written in plain text with a simple syntax of comma separated terms for the columns and linebreaks to separate the column rows.
Example of the first .csv file of our DIY DOI experiment, https://doi.org/10.70934/0yxnhx. The first line forms the column headers, the second line provides the data:
DOI,<funder_name>,<award_number>,<license_ref>,<vor_lic_start_date> 10.70934/0yxnhx,CHANSE,101004509,https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html,2024-10-25
(To check your syntax, open the .csv file in a spreadsheet application such as libreoffice calc)
| DOI | <funder name> | <award number> | <license ref> | <vor_lic_start_date> |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10.70934/0yxnhx | CHANSE | 101004509 | https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html | 2024-10-25 |
- Upload via the web deposit form’s supplemental metadata upload option (beta), you will need to enter your Crossref member name and password here.
- Note that changes submitted via csv might take some hours to appaear in your DOI json record.
Notes on adding or changing metadata. Our test DOI for FRICTIONS, https://doi.org/10.70934/0yxnhx, we file as a report. Using the web upload form, reports have limited fields, including no licence or funder information, unlike with journal articles that include those fields by default (although ORCID records of the authors can still be added). To add licence and funder information requires a separate csv file, which can then refer to one or more DOI, and upload via the web deposit form’s supplemental metadata upload option (beta): the first line forms the column headers, the second line provides the data criteria,criteria linebreak metadata, metadata.