So, yeah, I learned a little bit about this recently, the overall DOI 
environment is a bit confusing to understand exactly what the options 
and trade-offs are.

So there are various DOI top-level registrars that can register DOIs. (I 
don't know if "registrar" is actually the name DOI uses for em, it's 
what I'm calling them).

For scholarly publications, CrossRef is the one that's typically used.  
But to register a DOI through CrossRef, a "publisher" needs to have a 
relationship/membership with CrossRef, which has some non-trivial 
expenses and obligations (such as being _required_ by CrossRef to look 
up DOIs for any works cited in the published work, and include those in 
the published work).  And I'm not entirely sure what tools CrossRef 
gives you for managing your DOIs.

I am not sure how an individual dude who wants a few DOIs would best go 
about getting them through CrossRef, might be worth asking CrossRef is 
there is any feasible way to do this.

Any DOI registration through any registrar will get DOI forwarding 
resolution. That is, for instance, http request to 
http://dx.doi.org/something gets redirected to your destination URL.  
Any DOI through any registrar gets this.

When you register a DOI through CrossRef, you also get a 'metadata 
lookup' service, where a person or machine armed with a DOI can look up 
article metadata such as author, title, journal, etc., from a CrossRef 
service. This is not part of the central DOI architecture, but something 
through CrossRef.  Some library-sector software (such as SFX) is set up 
to do these metadata lookups from CrossRef on any DOI -- if the DOI 
wasn't registered through CrossRef, they won't get any info back.

Now, in addition to CrossRef, there are some other registrars.  One I 
know about is DateCite.  And as Keven mentions, the EZID service is a 
pretty slick front-end that allows you to register and maintain DateCite 
DOIs.  While DataCite was set up for assigning DOIs to data sets,  as 
far as I know nothing in any policies (of DOI foundation, DataCite, or 
EZID) prevents you from using DateCite DOIs in general or EZID-managed 
DataCite DOIs in particular for any kind of information resource you 
want, including scholarly articles, or whatever.

EZID may still be free at the moment in it's testing phase, but 
eventually, I am told by EZID, that there WILL be a cost charged.  
However, I think the cost model, tools provided, and obligatory 
requirements (none) of EZID/DataCite compared to CrossRef may be more 
amenable/feasible for a small project.

However, using EZID/DataCite you won't get the CrossRef metadata lookup 
that some library-sector applications (like SFX) use.  DataCite is, I 
hear, planning on adding their own metadata lookup service. But the 
library applications will still only be using the CrossRef one unless 
they are updated, and the DataCite one may use an entirely different 
data schema/vocabulary than CrossRef -- this metadata lookup thing is 
not something actually standardized for DOI in general, in terms of 
either API or response schema. Or discovering a metadata lookup service 
to use for a given DOI. (I tend to think DOI probably ought to work on 
some standardization and auto-discovery here, personally. ).



On 4/13/2011 11:57 AM, Kevin S. Clarke wrote:
> 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
>