Skip to content

Help & guidance Data access and reuse

Digital Object Identifiers (DOI)

Logo for the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Foundation
A DOI is a Digital Object Identifier which can be used to consistently and accurately reference digital objects. DOIs provide a way for ADS resources to be cited in a similar fashion to traditional scholarly materials. Each DOI has metadata associated with it, such as subject, location (URL), publisher and creator. While this metadata can change, the actual DOI will never change. This allows for a digital object’s DOI to be permanent while the actual location of the archive can change. Citing a DOI is much more robust and permanent than citing a URL.

Citing DOI

The Crossref DOI Display guidelines recommend that DOIs should be displayed in the following format:

https://doi.org/10.5284/1042733

e.g. Jeffrey, S., Hale, A., Jones, C., Maxwell, M. and Jones, S. (2017). ACCORD: Archaeology Community Co-production of Research Data [data-set]. York: Archaeology Data Service [distributor]. https://doi.org/10.5284/1042733