Assignment of DOIs

[Schpidi]

We're proposing to use DataCite to assign DOIs. For the development we'll be using a test environment provided by Eurac and afterwards we propose to request an EarthCODE or ESA prefix.

One question that came up is if we'll always assign a DOI to anything that gets published in OSC and thus this could be done in an automated process or if users have to explicitly request one or provide an already existing one? Does anybody have an opinion or experience about this?

[Schpidi]

Cc @andvianello

[andvianello]

From our experience it's better that the user requests for DOI registration especilly to void some test uploads on OSC and to register DOI for nothing (DOI can be deleted only when in DRAFT status).
Or another idea could be to set DOI field mandatory for metadata publication. In this way user pays attention to DOI field and he should fill it with an already existing DOI or request for registration.
If the same dataset is already uploaded in other repositories, such as Zenodo, for sure there is a DOI.

Let's keep in mind that the annual fee for Datacite membership depends on number of DOI registration.