This document is under development.

DOI support

We (at Technische Universität Berlin) want to use DOIs for Items within DSpace. We are thinking about using DOIs for Communities and Collections at first we'll concentrate on items. A DOI is a well known persistent identifier and with the external identifier support atMire introduced to DSpace 3.0 with the versioning support it should be possible to add support to mint, register and delete DOIs using DSpace.

To register a DOI one has to make a contract with a DOI registration agency, several agencies exists. Different DOI registration agencies have different rules. Some offers registration of DOI specially or only for academic environment, others only for publishing companies. Most of the registration agencies take fees for registering DOIs, all of them have different rules describing for what kind of item a DOI can be registered. To implement DOI support for DataCite we have to take care that every registration agency has their own API (see below).