Digital Object Identifier

DOIs are essential for getting credit for data you produce and citing them in publications.  Using DOIs is part of the process of making your data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible (FAIR).

As part of implementing the ESRF data policy, the ESRF started in March 2018 to assign Digital Object Identifier (DOI) names to all data from each session on beamlines. These automatically generated DOIs are however only created as placeholders for data which are not published by the experimental team. Experimental teams i.e. the originators of the data, are requested to create a bespoke DOIs which contain only the data which are used in each publication e.g. pertaining to a single sample or sample setup.  This makes it easier to find and reuse the data which were used for each publication. This is especially true for publishing data in databases like the PDB for example. If the data are duplicated in another data repository e.g. Zenodo, the DOI from the ESRF must be cited as the origin of the data. The ESRF Data Policy requires users to cite the DOIs of their data in publications. In the case where users of data are not part of the experimental team they must use the automatically generated DOI (for the whole session) or the bespoke DOIs if these contain all the data reused.

For more information about how to use DOIs for citing data taken at the ESRF please refer to the DOI - HOW TO page.

To understand the concepts around DOIs refer to the DOI - CONCEPTS page and visit the ESRF DOI portal (https://doi.esrf.fr) or watch this video produced by PaNOSC.

Whatever you do - use DOIs to cite your data!