TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is a DOI?

From the APA website: "A digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the internet. The publisher assigns a DOI when your article is published and made available electronically."


For example, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1458125 is the URL of a publication, but only a portion (10.5281/zenodo.1458125) is the DOI. 


Articles accepted in many popular online journals or conference proceedings are often (though not always) assigned a DOI.



If I deposit my work to the UPOU Institutional Repository, will my work be assigned a DOI?

At the moment, the UPOU Institutional Repository is unable to assign a DOI to your work. However, we plan on adding support for this in the future. In the meantime, your work will be assigned a unique that is identifier similar to a DOI, called a Handle identifier. (In fact, the DOI system runs on the Handle system.) 


However, DOIs are an important part of how the impact of research is tracked. We strongly recommend that any work you deposit to the Repository should already have a preexisting DOI associated with it, and that you include the DOI information in your deposit. 



My work does not have a preexisting DOI associated with it. How do I get one? 

There are several ways to get a DOI for your work. For example, commercial repositories like ResearchGate can assign one to your DOI. However, we strongly recommend that you get a DOI for your work by first depositing your work in the UP Open University Community in Zenodo. 


After you deposit your work on Zenodo, you will be issued a DOI that you can use when you depositing the file again in the UPOU Repository. (You may be asking yourself, why do I have to upload my file twice? What's the point of depositing the same file in different repositories? This is a good question, and we answer it in this article.)