DOI Policy¶

Overview¶

This policy governs when and why the Digital Collections unit of the Texas A&M University Libraries assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to content it hosts or stewards. It is intended for staff evaluating DOI requests and for depositors who want to understand what qualifies.

A DOI is only as reliable as the organization that stands behind it. Every practice in this document traces back to one requirement: an organization may only assign a DOI to content it has direct, ongoing responsibility for, and every DOI must resolve to a stable landing page that the organization controls. This means never directly to the content itself. This principle, and the reasoning behind it, is drawn from DataCite and Crossref policy documentation and from how peer institutions have written it into their own practice (see Policies Reviewed).

Scope¶

This policy applies to DOI requests for content in three areas the Digital Collections unit is responsible for:

Items in the Institutional Repository (OAKTrust)
Items in the Data Repository
Articles and issues in OJS journals we host

Requests for DOIs on content outside these three areas including externally hosted websites, personal or departmental sites, or platforms the Libraries do not administer fall outside this policy. See Stewardship Requirements for why that boundary exists.

Registration Agency of Record¶

The Libraries maintain an active institutional membership with Crossref and assign DOIs exclusively through that membership. Crossref membership carries binding obligations including most importantly, that every DOI resolve to a unique landing page carrying a full bibliographic citation, that the DOI be displayed on that page, and that the Libraries remain responsible for keeping the link current. Those obligations are the basis for most of the requirements below.

Why We Assign DOIs¶

DOIs are not a formality attached to a finished item; they are a commitment. Before a DOI is minted, the underlying reasoning is:

Persistent citation. A DOI gives a work one stable, resolvable citation link for its lifetime, independent of any particular URL, server migration, or platform change.
Discoverability and reference linking. Crossref DOIs plug content into the scholarly citation graph. Reference lists, indexing services, and discovery layers rely on them to connect a citation to the work it points to.
Meeting funder and publisher requirements. Data-sharing mandates and journal submission requirements increasingly expect a citable, persistent identifier, not just a URL.
Signaling institutional stewardship. Minting a DOI is the Libraries telling the scholarly record, in effect, “we are responsible for this content and will keep the link working.” That signal is only honest if it is backed by an actual persistence commitment — see Stewardship Requirements.

Because that last point is a commitment, not a technical trick, a DOI is never minted purely because it was requested. It is minted because the content lives somewhere the Libraries control and intend to maintain.

What We Assign DOIs To¶

Institutional Repository (OAKTrust)¶

What qualifies: Research articles and reports, technical reports and white papers, conference papers or proceedings, digital media objects, and other scholarly or institutional outputs deposited in OAKTrust.

Why OAKTrust content is eligible: Content in OAKTrust is already under direct institutional stewardship — it is deposited into infrastructure the Libraries operate, with an existing item-level landing page and a persistence commitment behind it. That satisfies the stewardship precondition on its own. A DOI adds what OAKTrust’s native handle-based identifier does not provide by itself: inclusion in Crossref’s reference-linking graph, compatibility with citation managers that expect a DOI rather than a handle, and discoverability through services that index by DOI.

Note: not every item type deposited in OAKTrust automatically qualifies. Some peer institutions (e.g., Georgetown) exclude theses and dissertations from DOI minting even though they accept them into the repository. Digital Collections should apply the same eligibility list above rather than assuming everything in OAKTrust qualifies by default.

Data Repository¶

What qualifies: Research datasets curated and hosted under Digital Collections stewardship, where the dataset’s full metadata and access conditions are known and documented.

Why datasets get their own DOI: A dataset is a distinct scholarly output from the article that discusses it, and it needs its own citable, trackable identifier so it can be attributed, cited, and reused independently — this is the same reasoning that underlies FAIR data principles and most funder data-sharing mandates.

Duplicate-DOI check (required before minting): Before assigning a DOI to a dataset, confirm it has not already been assigned one by another registration agency — for example, a dataset self-deposited by a researcher into a Dataverse-based repository typically receives a DOI automatically at deposit. If a DOI already exists for the object, do not mint a second one for the same content. Instead, reference the existing DOI as a related identifier in the new record (or decline to mint, if the existing DOI already serves the citation need). Both DataCite and Crossref policy explicitly prohibit assigning a DOI to content that already carries one elsewhere.

OJS-Hosted Journals¶

What qualifies: Articles and issues published in Open Journal Systems (OJS) titles that the Libraries host and administer, such as the Texas Water Journal.

Why journal content is the clearest case for a DOI: Journal articles are the original use case Crossref was built around. Reference linking — using Crossref DOIs to connect a citing article to the article it cites — is a condition of Crossref membership, not an optional feature. For an open-access journal in particular, a DOI is often what allows the journal to appear in major indexing and discovery services (e.g., DOAJ-linked tools, citation databases) at all. Because the Libraries directly operate the OJS instance, the stewardship and landing-page requirements are met by construction: each article already has a stable, Libraries-controlled URL.

Stewardship Requirements¶

A DOI request should not be approved unless all of the following are true:

The Libraries have direct responsibility for the content — it is deposited in OAKTrust, the Data Repository, or a Libraries-hosted OJS journal. Content hosted on infrastructure the Libraries do not control (a personal or departmental website, an external platform, etc.) does not qualify, regardless of how the request is framed, because the Libraries cannot guarantee the persistence commitment a DOI implies.
The Libraries can update the content and its metadata over time, not just at the moment of minting.
The content is not already assigned a DOI elsewhere (see the duplicate-DOI check above).
A landing page exists and meets the requirements below.

Landing Page Requirements¶

Every DOI must resolve to a landing page — never directly to a PDF, dataset file, or other raw content. The landing page must:

Display a full bibliographic citation for the item.
Display the DOI itself as a resolvable link (https://doi.org/...).
Provide a way to access the item (or, if access is restricted, explain the restriction — the metadata must still be openly available even when the content is not).
Remain at a stable URL that Digital Collections controls, so that if the underlying platform changes, the landing page URL can be preserved or properly redirected rather than broken.

If content is later withdrawn, retracted, or removed, the landing page should be converted to a tombstone page rather than deleted: it should state that the item existed and explain why it is no longer available, and the DOI’s target URL should be updated to point to it. The DOI itself is never deleted.

Request & Review Workflow¶

Depositor or content owner submits a request through the Digital Collections request form, along with descriptive metadata (title, creator(s), date, abstract, hosting URL, responsible unit, resource type, and license).
Digital Collections reviews the request against the eligibility criteria in What We Assign DOIs To and the stewardship requirements in Stewardship Requirements.
If approved, the DOI is minted in Crossref and the metadata record is registered.
The DOI is returned to the depositor and added to the item’s landing page.

Roles and Responsibilities¶

Digital Collections evaluates requests, mints and registers DOIs, and is responsible for keeping DOI target URLs current if content moves within Libraries-controlled infrastructure.
Content owners / depositors are responsible for providing accurate, complete metadata and for notifying Digital Collections if an item is moved, corrected, or withdrawn.
Digital Collections (not the individual depositor) remains the Crossref-facing steward of record for every DOI minted under this policy, consistent with Crossref’s requirement that only the registering organization may update a DOI’s metadata and target URL.

Policies Reviewed¶

This policy was drafted after reviewing the following documentation from our registration agency, DataCite (reviewed for general persistent- identifier best practice, since much of its landing-page and stewardship guidance mirrors Crossref’s own), Crossref itself, and a sample of peer institutional policies.

Source	Document	Relevant to this policy
Crossref	Current Membership Terms	Member obligations for persistent URLs, archive/defunct-DOI provisions
Crossref	Understanding Your Member Obligations	Requirement for unique landing page URLs and legal rights to register content
Crossref	Display Guidelines	DOI display and landing-page citation requirements
Crossref	Resource and Full-Text URLs	Landing page vs. direct-resolution guidance
DataCite	DOI Registration Policy	Stewardship requirement; prohibition on duplicate DOIs
DataCite	Best Practices for DOI Registration	Landing page requirement; tombstone-page handling
DataCite	Best Practices for DOI Landing Pages	Landing page vs. direct-content resolution
Georgetown University Library	DOI Minting	Scoping DOI eligibility to items deposited in the institutional repository; exclusion of certain item types (e.g. theses)
Murdoch University	DOI Minting	Tying eligibility to the institutional repository as primary publication point
University of Miami Libraries	DOIs, Data Publication, Sharing and Preservation	Explicit depositor responsibility for perpetual access
Queen’s University Belfast	Digital Object Identifier Policy	Structure and governance of a short, formally owned DOI policy
Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi	DOIs at TAMU-CC Repository	Peer A&M System institution’s eligibility and deposit requirements
Texas A&M University Libraries	Requesting a DOI	Current internal service description, content eligibility list, and intake workflow this policy formalizes

Revision History¶

Version	Date	Author	Summary
0.1	2025-06-01	Digital Collections	Initial draft, compiled from DataCite and Crossref policy documentation and review of peer institutional DOI policies.