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The International DOI Foundation (IDF) has formalised its policy and procedures to help the members of its federation of Registration Agencies (RAs) ensure persistence, through collaborative action, of DOIs allocated by any RA. A keystone of the DOI is the concept of persistence, guaranteed not by technology but through a social infrastructure which accommodates the inevitable fact that some assigners of identifiers may be unable to guarantee persistence in isolation. The key points of the policy include:

• Only approved active RAs can allocate and manage new DOIs: DOIs are always under the control of an IDF member who participates under standard terms and conditions.
• Should an RA not be able to continue meeting its obligations under the terms and conditions of DOI membership, the RA may be suspended; during suspension existing DOIs will be managed, but no new DOI prefixes issued, by that RA.
• If necessary this suspension will be followed by termination as an RA. Its assigned DOIs will be managed on behalf of the former RA through the IDF RA federation, by transfer of DOIs to an existing RA; contractual arrangements made with an existing RA; or through redirection to a site controlled by IDF.

The policy has been put in place to ensure DOIs' persistence even with changes in business models, RAs, and the current evolution of the DOI marketplace which is seeing a variety of different business models developing.

The detailed policy is available to Members of the IDF. For further information, please contact n.paskin@doi.org.

The International DOI Foundation has adopted a Patent Policy covering the rights and obligations of DOI Registration Agencies, following completion of its Strategic Review and approval at the 2005 members' meeting. This policy is now binding on all current and future IDF registration agencies. The goals of the policy are to:

• Support the existing commitment that DOI to be an open standard and system available to all who want to use it on equal terms (see "IDF re-affirms DOI as an open specification", October 2004
• Preserve and protect the collective investment in the DOI system and standard
• Encourage Registration Agencies to develop added-value services and features on top of the Core DOI System

For further information, see the IDF Press Release, September 2005 "International DOI Foundation adopts policy on patents to foster wide distribution and use of DOIs".

CrossRef, the DOI-based reference-linking service for scholarly and professional content, has launched a freely available OpenURL resolver to facilitate navigation to the 17+ million DOI items now registered in CrossRef. The resolver, described at http://www.crossref.org/openurl, allows users to enter an OpenURL as one way to be directed to publications from the hundreds of publishers and societies that participate in CrossRef by registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for their content.

For further information, see the press release "CrossRef Deploys Free OpenURL Resolver".

Connotea, the free online reference management and social bookmarking service, can now recognise and store Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). As well as bookmarking general web URLs, it can now bookmark a DOI directly. Connotea will convert the DOI to a web link and retrieve the citation information for that DOI from CrossRef. The Connotea bookmarklet also allows users to highlight and bookmark a DOI from within an article web page.

For further information see Connotea, and "Social Bookmarking Tools (II) A Case Study - Connotea" in D-Lib magazine (doi:10.1045/april2005-lund). Queries about Connotea should be sent to connotea@nature.com.

Following completion of the NISO ballot on the revised version of NISO Z39.84, Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier, the standard has been approved by NISO and is in the formal final approval process with ANSI prior to publication. The revised standard improves the explanation of DOI in the previous (2000) edition in a number of areas, but is fully compatible with DOIs assigned under the 2000 standard.

For further information see "Revision of NISO standard: DOI Syntax", April 2005.

"DOIs and Deeplinked E-Reserves: Innovative Links for the Future" is the title of a recent paper in Technical Services Quarterly by Scott A. Warren, Librarian at North Carolina State University Libraries. This paper points out that OpenURLs and DOIs are complementary, stresses the advantages of DOIs, and argues that there are many as yet untapped applications of DOI in persistent linking in archives. (From the abstract: "Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have uses beyond reference linking and document identification, which are their current primary selling points. Due to their inherent stability, DOIs are well suited for creating deeplinked e-reserves. This paper outlines reasons why libraries should use DOIs whenever possible in the construction of deeplinked e-reserves and provides examples of how such linking can take place, including means for providing security and authentication. Other innovative uses for DOIs in academic libraries are suggested."

See "DOIs and Deeplinked E-Reserves: Innovative Links for the Future" by Scott A Warren; Technical Services Quarterly, Vol. 22(4) 2005 (doi:10.1300/J124v22n04_01). Article copies are available for a fee from the Haworth Document Delivery Service, docdelivery@haworthpress.com.

The DOI will feature in a joint EDItEUR/AKP seminar on "Electronic publishing, Digital archiving and Licensing" at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday, October 20. The meeting is open to all interested parties and a programme is now available.

See the seminar announcement for more information.