DOIs are used for a variety of content types including reports, datasets, supplementary materials, images, and other scholarly and research outputs. As a member of the University of New Hampshire, you can request a DOI through the UNH Library for your scholarly and research outputs. Your DOI will resolve to a landing page in the UNH Scholars’ Repository, which will either provide direct access to the content, a stable link to where users can access the content, or descriptive metadata that identifies the content and its location.
To learn more or to request a DOI, contact our Institutional Repository Coordinator. We will ask you to complete a simple form with basic information about your content and submit a copy of your content or a stable link to your content. If you or your group request a large number of DOIs in a fiscal year for a special project, please contact us so we can negotiate a cost-share with you.
DOIs are persistent unique identifiers designed for research objects, such as articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, data sets, etc. The DOI system is designed to identify objects (or metadata for those objects) wherever they are located on the web, unlike a URL which points to a specific location on the web which may change or disappear over time. With DOIs, dead links should not happen.
DOIs are typically issued at the time of an object's publication, much like an ISBN or serial number. All DOIs begin with a 10 and contain a prefix and a suffix separated by a slash. The prefix is a unique number of four or more digits assigned to organizations; the suffix is assigned by the publisher and identifies the object.
Why use a DOI for your scholarly and research outputs?
Tracking an article's metrics helps researchers measure the impact of their work and the number of times it is cited, discussed, shared, bookmarked, or otherwise used across the Internet. Published materials such as reports, grey literature, datasets, and other outputs that are not published via traditional scholarly mechanisms are often difficult to track and so some metric tools won’t always provide a full picture of where or how they are being used. DOIs can help with this!
Beyond ensuring continued access to scholarly outputs, DOIs offer the benefit of being traceable across the web, which allows metrics of published material's success to be tracked over time. Alternative metrics or altmetrics aim at capturing success through additional means that citation counts, including article mentions on Twitter, the number of times an article is publicly bookmarked or saved to a citation manager, etc.
The best way to ensure that altmetrics can be collected for an object is to place it in a repository that already has tools in place to track altmetric data, but there are other services that can help gather altmetrics.
