The Monash Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Minter was developed by the  ANDS-funded Monash University Major Open Data Collections (MODC) Project as an extendible service and deployed on the Monash node (R@CMon) of the NeCTAR Research Cloud for providing a persistent and unique identifier for datasets and research publications. A DOI is permanently assigned to datasets and publications to provide information about them, including where they or information about them can be found on the Internet. The DOI will not change even if information about the datasets changes over time.

Store.Synchrotron’s data publishing form using the Monash DOI minter service.

The Monash DOI Minter gives Monash University the ability to mint DOIs for data collections that are hosted and managed by services on R@CMon. The integration and accessibly to DOIs has never been easier. For instance the Monash Library can now use this service to mint DOIs for publicly accessible research collections.  But also it is now being utilised by the Australian Synchrotron’s Store.Synchrotron service, which manages data produced by the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) beamline and streamlines DOI minting for datasets through a publication workflow.

A demo published collection on Store.Synchrotron.

An MX beamline user can now collect data on the beamline which is stored, archived and made accessible through the Store.Synchrotron service. When the researcher has publication quality data, a copy of this data is deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), with the appropriate metadata. The new publication workflow allows researchers to publish data hosted by the Store.Synchrotron service, with PDB metadata being automatically attached to the datasets, and a DOI being minted and activated after a researcher-selected embargo period. The DOI reference can then be included in their research papers.

We think it is a brilliant pattern of play for accelerating persistent identifiers of research data held at universities. To this end, we have made the DOI Minter available for others to instantiate.