The world of DOIs for geodetic data – metadata recommendations and status report of the GGOS DOI Working Group

The use of digital object identifiers (DOI) for scientific data and scientific software is increasingly common practice for more than a decade. As a result of the Coalition on Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Sciences (COPDESS) and other initiatives, DOI-referenced datasets are fully citable in scholarly literature and more and more journals require the availability of data underlying scientific results and their citation. Technical implementations, like Scholix (a framework for Scholarly Link Exchange) enable direct links and between literature and data and support the visibility of research data. Key elements for enabling these links are persistent identifier (PID). These PIDs allow, e.g., to uniquely identify data, scholarly literature and code (via DOIs), persons (via ORCID), institutions and funding agencies (via ROR – the registry of research organizations), via machine-actionable links and should be included in the DOI metadata.

Similar to other scientific disciplines, the use of DOI for geodetic data is increasing in the last years. While this is easy for static data, like for global of regional gravitational models or GNSS campaign data, most geodetic data are large (mainly due to the large number of files and high temporal resolution) and highly dynamic (real time data acquisition) and highly granular. Geodetic services of the International Association for Geodesy (IAG) are international key player for geodetic data provision and distribution and their operating institutions and funding agencies increasingly require the provision of tangible data use and access statistics. Credit through citation was a major reason for the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) to establish a Working Group on using DOI for geodetic data sets (GGOS DOI WG) and for the working group members.

The GGOS DOI WG was established in 2019 and includes international representatives of IAG Services and geodetic data centres and associated members that aims at developing best practices and recommendations for the consistent implementation of DOIs across all IAG Services and in the greater geodetic community. This presentation will give an update on recent group activities and on the status of DOI minting for geodetic datasets across IAG Services.