The International DOI Foundation is pleased to welcome a new member, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), the world's largest library of science and technology. TIB is to act as IDF contact for a major project, initially of one year duration from 1 October, made possible by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), which will implement the use of DOIs to persistently identify scientific data sets. The project is co-ordinated by the World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) at the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in Hamburg.

This follows from earlier work by a National Committee of CODATA, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology of the International Council for Science (http://www.icsu.org), resulting in a report "Concept of Citing Scientific Primary Data" in May 2002 recommending the use of DOIs. A continuation through a one year project for pilot implementation has now been made possible by a grant from DFG, the central research organisation that promotes research at universities and other publicly financed research institutions in Germany.

A team from several data centres, led by Dr Michael Lautenschlager at the World Data Centre for Climate, will focus on providing a means of publicly registering data sets with a persistent identifier and structured basic description. The pilot deployment will use geo-reference data (e.g., from observational stations, satellites, and climate models), but will in principle be extensible to any scientific data. This use of DOI will provide for the effective publication of primary data using a persistent identifier for long-term data referencing, allowing scientists to cite and re-use valuable primary data. The DOI's persistent and globally resolvable identifier, associated to both a stable link to the data and also a standardised description of the identified data, offers the necessary functionality and also ready interoperability with other material such as scientific articles.

Dr Michael Lautenschlager said: "This development will ameliorate current shortcomings in data provision and interdisciplinary use, where data sources may not be widely known and data are archived without context. It will enable citations of data in a standard manner, and also facilitate links to more specialised data schemes. The DOI system offers us a proven well-developed system which is already widely deployed and enables us to focus our efforts on the scientific data aspects of the project."

Dr Norman Paskin, Director of the International DOI Foundation, commented: "The IDF has long shared this view (see "Digital Object Identifiers and Digital Preservation of the Record of Science": http://www.doi.org/topics/020210_CSTI.pdf). DOIs are already widely used for the identification of scientific journal articles, through the organisation CrossRef, which recently registered the ten millionth DOI, and we see this as a natural complementary activity as well as an important development in its own right".

Dr Irina Sens, Deputy Librarian of the TIB, said: "TIB is constantly increasing the ready access of scientists to electronic publications, and to items such as "grey literature" which are not otherwise easily available, and this project is a further step in TIB's role since 1959 as a source of information in all areas of technology and sciences. Access to digital sources via subject gateways and virtual libraries is already significant and datasets are a further vital resource for the scientific community".

For further information:

Dr Irina Sens, TIB
irina.sens@tib.uni-hannover.de
Tel: (+49) 511 7623426

Dr Michael Lautenschlager, WDCC Hamburg
lautenschlager@dkrz.de
Tel: (+49) 40 41173297

Dr Norman Paskin, International DOI Foundation
n.paskin@doi.org
Tel: (+44) 1865 314033