New Study Finds Positive Impact From Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
November 2004

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a technology that helps make information more discoverable through persistent linking and interlinking. It has been adopted universally across the scientific/ technical/medical (STM) publishing sector and more recently is being adopted in other sectors of publishing and other industries. Greenhouse Associates has just made available an analysis of the DOI’s impact on publishers based on case studies of DOI use by publishers in the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Australia. Download white paper

While the name implies that the DOI is applicable only to digital content, it is more aptly seen as useful to any products, digital or physical, as they are represented on the internet. Furthermore, once a user locates any single object, that object’s DOI can enable the user to see availability of all related objects, thus improving user navigation without affecting search functionality and enhancing further discovery. For example, a link to a book might also reflect information such as reviews, pricing, ordering information, ancillaries, supplements, and other products on the same subject or by the same author. In addition, the DOI enables publishers to make available more “granular” components, such as individual chapters or problem sets.

Our research showed that publishers have achieved measurable benefits from the DOI in a number of ways:

• Increased discoverability of content via cross-linking: Publishers using DOIs have experienced significant increases in inbound traffic to specific pieces of content from a variety of sources: search engines, aggregators, and other publishers’ content.

• Increases in content sales: Use of the DOI is still relatively new, and only a few publishers have established systems to track revenues attributable to the DOI. However, most publishers are convinced that the added traffic generated by DOIs results in increased revenues.

• Tangible cost savings: While reducing costs was not a primary motivation for implementing DOIs, publishers have found that using DOIs results in ongoing savings in several ways, including maintaining hyperlinks, tracking content purchases and usage, and reducing the need for customer service.

Most publishers expect rapid payback on their initial investments, and see cumulative benefits in using the DOI over time. They plan to increase their investment in DOIs by adding DOIs to more of their documents, putting DOIs on additional forms of content, and developing systems to automate the production and maintenance of DOIs. Download white paper