Recent work on Alveo now allows us to allocate a DOI for any collection held on the system. A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is intended to be a persistent digital identifier for an electronic resource; one that can be cited in your publications.
To be able to allocate a DOI we needed to have public pages corresponding to each collection in Alveo. In the past, collection pages have only been visible to logged in users. In addition to making these pages public, we have provided the option of adding a rich text description of the collection and adding attachments to the collection page – such as images or PDF files. The result is that now, collection pages can act as the main `landing’ page for a collection and provide full documentation for future users. Since these pages are visible without login, they will be indexed by search engines and should help users find your collections.
Once public pages were available, we established a procedure through Macquarie University Library to allocate a DOI for a collection. The ultimate provider of the DOI is ANDS through their Cite My Data service. Macquarie acts as a overseer to help ensure that the DOI is long-lasting. Should the hosting of Alveo move to another institution in future, the management of the DOIs can also be transferred.
It is appropriate to issue a DOI for a collection on Alveo if the following conditions are met:
- the collection is complete and you do not envisage it changing in future
- Alveo is the main and definitive source for the data
The process to issue a DOI is manual at the moment – a collection owner can contact me (Steve Cassidy) to request a DOI. I will then liaise with them to confirm the conditions above and that the appropriate meta-data is present in the collection before issuing a DOI.
Our first DOI has been created for the MAVA Collection by Vincent Aubanel 10.4227/139/59a4c21a896a3 which Vincent has now cited in this paper: Contribution of visual rhythmic information to speech perception in noise.
If you are the owner of a collection on Alveo and would like to take advantage of this facility please get in touch.
If your collection is not already on Alveo you could also get in touch, but watch this space for news about easier ways to get your data uploaded to Alveo.