Persistent Identifier

It is good practice to use Persistent Identifiers to address items in a digital repository. There are many different systems for Persistent Identifiers: Handle , DOI , urn:nbn, purl and many more. It is far out of the scope of this document to discuss the differences of all these systems. For several reasons the Handle System is deeply integrated in DSpace, and DSpace makes intensive use of it. With DSpace 3.0 the Identifier Service was introduced that makes it possible to also use external identifier services within DSpace.

DOIs are Persistent Identifiers like Handles are, but as many big publishing companies use DOIs they are quite well-known to scientists. Some journals ask for DOIs to link supplemental material whenever an article is submitted. Beginning with DSpace 4.0 it is possible to use DOIs in parallel to the Handle System within DSpace. By "using DOIs" we mean automatic generation, reservation and registration of DOIs for every item that enters the repository. These newly registered DOIs will not be used as a means to build URLs to DSpace items. Items will still rely on handle assignment for the item urls.

DOI Registration Agencies

To register a DOI one has to enter into a contract with a DOI registration agency which is a member of the International DOI Foundation. Several such agencies exist. Different DOI registration agencies have different policies. Some of them offer DOI registration especially or only for academic institutions, others only for publishing companies. Most of the registration agencies charge fees for registering DOIs, and all of them have different rules describing for what kind of item a DOI can be registered. To make it quite clear: to register DOIs with DSpace you have to enter into a contract with a DOI registration agency.

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DSpace currently generates DOIs for items only. There is no support to generate DOIs for Communities and Collections yet.

JSPUI specific configurations

You can configure whether the JSPUI should show DOIs or handles on item frontdoors. Heading an item frontdoor there is an informational note containing a Persistent Identifier and the request to use it when one wants to refer to this item. By setting the property webui.preferred.identifier to doi in dspace.cfg, you can configure the JSPUI to use DOIs instead of handles which are used by default. This property also controls which Persistent Identifiers are used in the Version History that is shown if Item Level Versioning is used and version history is enabled.

Further more you can configure whether DOIs should contain a doi: prefix or not in the version history. The property webui.identifier.strip-prefixes in dspace.cfg controls this. By default the doi: prefix is stripped (not shown).

Adding support for other Registration Agencies

If you want DSpace to support other registration agencies, you just have to write a Java class that implements the interface DOIConnector ([dspace-source]/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/identifier/doi/DOIConnector.java). You might use the DataCiteConnector ([dspace-source]/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/identifier/doi/DataCiteConnector.java) as an example. After developing your own DOIConnector, you configure DSpace as if you were using the DataCite API directly. Just use your DOIConnector when configuring the IdentifierService instead of the DataCiteConnector.

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