Motivation and strategies for implementing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) at NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory -- Past progress and future collaborations

Abstract

In an effort to lead our community in following modern data citation practices by formally citing data used in published research and implementing standards to facilitate reproducible research results and data, while also producing meaningful metrics that help assess the impact of our services, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) has implemented the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) (DataCite 2017) for both physical objects (e.g., research platforms and instruments) and datasets. We discuss why this work is important and timely, and review the development of guidelines for the use of DOIs at EOL by focusing on how decisions were made. We discuss progress in assigning DOIs to physical objects and datasets, summarize plans to cite software, describe a current collaboration to develop community tools to display citations on websites, and touch on future plans to cite workflows that document dataset processing and quality control. Finally, we will review the status of efforts to engage our scientific community in the process of using DOIs in their research publications.