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Background: The Developer Team recently had detailed discussions around where DOIs are stored in DSpace, and how to better manage their storage going forward.
Currently, based on the DOI system instances have configured, DOIs may be stored in either "dc.identifier.uri" (alongside Handles), in "dc.identifier", or in "dc.identifier.doi". See this ticket: https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-2199
After much discussion, the Developer Team proposes, starting with DSpace 7, (automatically*) moving all DSpace-generated DOIs into a new (for DSpace master code) "dc.identifier.doi" field. This would standardize their location, and also keep them separate from Handles (which are stored in "dc.identifier.uri"). The full details of the proposal can be found in this ticket: https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-3708
The Developer Team notes that the "dc.identifier.doi" field is another non-standard DC field (for the master code). But they would like to simply keep DOIs in a location alongside other identifiers. However, they hope that, in the future, a Metadata Working Group (or similar) could be established to help the Developer Team determine the DSpace metadata best practices going forward.
*it would happen automatically during the upgrade process, and wouldn't be configurable. But, they would only automate for DOIs that *DSpace generated* (they can determine this based on data in the 'doi' database table). So, any other DOIs you are storing which are not generated by DSpace would be kept where they currently exist.
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