Developed in the 1990s under the direction the Association of American Publishers, the Digital Object Identifier is a system for permanently identifying and indexing book and article content in the online environment; it has gained robust acceptance among STM and academic journal publishers. But while trade book publishers are using the DOI, the agencies that handle its registration are looking for ways to further promote its use among trade publishers.
The registration of DOIs is handled by eight agencies, among them CrossRef, a nonprofit consortium of scholarly and academic publishers, and R.R. Bowker, the publishers information company and ISBN-assignment agency.
Amy Brand, CrossRef director of business development, said that while CrossRef has issued more than 27 million DOIs, representing 18,000 journals and 35,000 book publishers, only about one million DOIs are for book content, a number that includes chapters and smaller units of information within the books.
Nevertheless, Brand said, registration of book DOIs is growing. Academic publishers have embraced the DOI because permanent reference links and citations are “the core of scholarship.” But while the DOI is useful to trade book publishers for all kinds of marketing information, Brand said these benefits have “not been as aggressively promoted.” While applications like book widgets garner attention, Brand said the DOI offers publishers much more value by creating “unique stable IDs to their content in a central registry.”
Bowker's Angela D'Agostino described the DOI as an effective search engine optimization tool. But she said the DOI has suffered among book publishers from a misperception that DOIs cost $1 each. She said the price of registering DOIs varies, depending on the service, and she emphasized that DOIs “are predominantly used to market physical books, not digital ones.”
To highlight the DOI's utility, Bowker is considering turning all ISBNs into DOIs. This would allow consumers to click on DOI/ISBNs and default to a Books in Print entry until the publisher signs on and adds marketing and other bibliographic data.
“Our plan is to work closely with Bowker and other agencies,” said Brand, “so a publisher registering DOIs with one agency can easily take advantage of the core services offered by other DOI agencies.”
