1. DOI Overview to Support its Use in GSICS
Peter Miu EUMETSAT
CMA, CNES, EUMETSAT, ISRO, IMD, JMA, KMA, NASA, NIST, NOAA, ROSHYDROMET, USGS, WMO

2. Purpose of this Presentation
I’ve been asked by the GRWG chair to brief GSICS members and interested parties on what DOIs are, how they are managed, and how they are used.
So in this presentation, I will share my experience of how the user community are using DOIs, and present the information I have acquired from authoring the operations procedure for administering DOIs by the EUMETSAT Data Centre.
The purpose of this presentation is to support GSICS members in deciding whether DOIs should be used for their GSICS related deliverables. There is a resources cost for using DOIs as you with see by the end of this presentation.

3. What are DOIs ?
DOIs provide a mechanism to uniquely identify an object.
Metadata about the object is persistently stored in association with the identifier in another location such as a web page URL describing the object.
The DOI for an object remains fixed over the shelf life of the object, whereas its metadata can change, e.g. the URL for the server hosting the object.
DOIs provide a stable reference as owners of such objects need only to change the metadata associated with a DOI if updates are needed.
Users of these objects can quote their associated DOIs as citations when documenting their work. These citations allows the reader to determine independently whether the referenced objects supports the author's argument in the claimed way, and to help the reader gauge the strength and validity of the objects the author has used in their work.

4. DOI Use Cases
DOI's are standard in today‘s publication of scientific journals and are now also increasingly used for publishing data in relevant journals.
I attended the 2014 European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna. I was interested in the use of satellite data in Geosciences so I attended the Earth and Space Science Informatics presentatons, and the papers discussed in the presentations are all tagged with DOIs.
EUMETSAT Climate Services Product team are developing a serie of Climate Data Records (CDRs) to support Climate Research and Studies with the view to providing policy makers, industry leaders and other stakeholders with the high-quality information they need to make decisions, coordinate policy areas, and formulate strategies relating to the environment. The EUMETSAT Data Centre will mint DOIs for these CDRs, and I have specified the operations procedure for performing this process (see Minting DOIs). Climate research results using these CDRs can cite these DOI for these data sets.

5. Managing DOIs: EUMETSAT’s Experience
Find a DOI “Management Agent” who can refer you to the most appropriate DOI member for your region to work with.
Once a DOI member has been found, a contract needs to be signed to agree to work as the member’s Data Centre (DC) for managing DOIs. The main requirements to become a DC:
Digital preservation and access of tagged objects (i.e. CDRs) must be guaranteed for at least 10 years.
Objects have to be worthy of citation and publication => peer review process of papers/research using the objects.
DOI name has to point to an available and maintained landing page containing meta-data information on the object.
Cost associated with becoming a DC:
150 € / year DOI admin fee; no cost for each DOI names; there a limits on the amount.
Resources are needed to define the procedure for assigning and minting DOIs; can be manual or automated.
Resources are needed to define the procedure for managing DOIs; can be manual or automated.

6. Minting DOIs (registering)
A DOI Name is composed of a prefix, then a “/” followed by a suffix i.e.
prefix/suffix
The prefix is fixed as this is issued by the DOI member working with the Data Centre. The DOI prefix for the EUMETSAT CDRs is:
There are no strict rules for defining how to construct the suffix although it is recommended by the DOI members that this part should be opaque i.e. does not contain ‘metadata like human-readable’ text.
EUMETSAT CDRs do not following this recommendation as the product developers have agreed to clearly promote them as EUMETSAT products. The naming convention used is:
<DOI Prefix>/<OWNER>_<GROUP>_<ENTITY>_<NUMBER>
Example DOI:
/EUM_SEC_CLM_0005
To mint this DOI, some mandatory meta-data is required to be defined into a XML file and the creation of a landing page containing as a minimum, the information provided into mandatory meta-data file.

7. Considerations for using DOIs
Is the object worthy of citation in its publication i.e. will user use it and quote the object as the source of their research?
If so, then who support the management of DOIs for GSICS i.e.
Legal aspects; act as the Data Centre managing the assigning and minting of DOIs, who does this; a specific GPRC, GCC, WMO ?
Who manages and operates DOIs for GSICS; specification and allocation of DOIs, coordinate the acquisition of DOI meta-data, coordinate the generation of a web accessible landing page, minting of the DOI, coordinating the maintenance of products with DOIs for the agreed shelf life.

8. End of Presentation: Thank you for your attention
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