On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:56 AM, Rick Johnson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>  We have a professor here who would like to create DOI's for some digital objects related to bioinformatics/bioscience with doi.org.   Has anyone had experience with the process of registering DOI's and what is involved in the process of maintaining/updating DOI information if necessary?

Hi,

I work on the Dryad data repository [1] which registers DOIs for data
packages (from the biosciences even).  We register our DOIs through
DataCite [2] and CDL's EZID service [3].  It's built into our workflow
so that we mint a DOI on submission and then register it with DataCite
(via EZID) after curation and acceptance.  CDL's EZID service provides
us with a web service through which we can programmatically register
our DOIs (it allows minting, too, but we do this internally).

This same interface can be used update/maintain DOI information (what
the DOI resolves to and the related DataCite metadata set).  In
addition to the Web service interface, EZID also offers a plain Web
interface as well that a person can use to register/update/maintain
the minted DOIs.  DOIs for data packages registered through DataCite
are resolvable via dx.doi.org (though we've found there is a slight
delay).  I don't know the details about the fee for using EZID (or
doi.org for that matter) -- basically, I can answer more questions
about the technical end, but the administrative end is out of my range
of experience.

But, my first thought is: "Are the digital objects the professor wants
a DOI for associated with a publication?"  If so, Dryad might be a
good place for him/her to deposit the data (fwiw, we take other
artifacts related to the raw data as a complete "data package" -- so,
for instance, R code used to manipulate the data).  Depositing the
data into Dryad would give him/her a DOI that can be used to reference
the data in future publications.  It also generates a larger pool of
bioscience data, rather than a lot of smaller pools (which have to be
searched across).

The caveats are that Dryad only takes data associated with a
publication and that we're a repository for the biosciences (but that
doesn't sound like a problem in this case).  I guess the other would
be anything deposited into Dryad is released using a Creative Commons
Zero waiver (I don't know if that would be a problem for this
particular user or not, but it shouldn't be -- yay, Open Data).

Hope that helps,
Kevin


[1] http://datadryad.org/
[2] http://datacite.org/
[3] http://n2t.net/ezid