Research Data Management

A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a unique persistent identifier for either digital or non-digital objects, whether or not they have any internet presence. Other than giving the data a persistent access, DOI names are supported by the International DOI Foundation (IDF) and Registration Agencies infrastructure, which provides ongoing DOI services and allows for a high level of confidence in the quality and accuracy of DOI names.

DOIs can be created for scholarly outputs such as datasets, literature, workflows, software, websites, etc.

Source: TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology

• A DOI is a persistent identifier providing easy online access to the digital object.
• It is tied to metadata and information about a digital object and hence it enhances the discoverability of the scholarly work.
• It enables accurate citation and accurate usage tracking of the scholarly output.
• It makes the creators of the scholarly output identifiable.

Adapted from: Young, S., 2019

NUS Libraries provides DOI minting service through DataCite for NUS Staff. 

If your dataset is hosted in ScholarBank@NUS, a DOI will be assigned to it automatically. 

To get a DOI for your scholarly output, please contact scholarbank@nus.edu.sg. Please indicate the resource type (e.g., dataset, website, technical report, etc.) and provide a short description of your items in the email. All DOI minting requests will be evaluated by NUS Libraries on a case-by-case basis.

In order for NUS Libraries to mint a DOI, the item must fulfil these essential criteria:

• The item (digital object) must be a scholarly output of NUS staff, for e.g., research data and collections, technical reports, websites, software, visualization, etc.
• The item must be open or licensed on the web with a valid URL. Please make sure you have the rights to make it publicly available.
• Please provide the minimum required metadata information for the item. The metadata information submitted will be open to the public and used freely for discovery. This is the information needed to create a DOI:
  • Resource Type
  • Title/Name
  • URL
  • Creators
  • Date of Publication/Date Available
  • Subjects
  • Publisher
• Please provide perpetual online access to the item.
• You are strongly recommended to provide a landing page with full information about the item as well as the download links.
• Once the DOI has been minted, you should put the DOI link in the same URL page. This will help facilitate discovery and citation.