LibGuides@Southampton: Research Identifiers: DOI for Data

Find data from a DOI

Do you have a DOI, but don't know what it refers to?

You can search the information held by DataCite - by DOI or by author/title/etc.

DataCite Metadata Search

Links for Data Reuse

Data Documentation Initiative This link opens in a new window
The Data Documentation Initiative is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. DDI is a free standard that can document and manage different stages in the research data lifecycle, such as conceptualization, collection, processing, distribution, discovery, and archiving.

Key Information

Get a DOI for the data underlying your research publication before you submit your work so you can include it in the data access statement.

We can register DOIs for data held within the university - typically the data is deposited via PURE into ePrints Soton. It is also possible to have a record of the data in ePrints Soton, and the data securely stored elsewhere and available on request. For further details see the University DOI Policy.

For more information, contact researchdata@soton.ac.uk

A number of other repositories can also register DOIs (e.g. the UK Data Archive and the NERC Data Centres).

Your published paper is a result of the data collected during your research.

The individual published paper will generally have its own DOI: obtaining a DOI for the underpinning data, so that others can access it easily, shows the breadth and depth of your work and so contributes to your academic reputation by allowing the impact of your data to be tracked..

The collection of data can be both expensive and time consuming and may not be reproducible: sharing such data makes a valuable contribution to the general body of knowledge.

Some data may be commercially sensitive or confidential, and there may be other reasons for delaying public availability: this is considered during the DOI allocation process.

Assigning a DOI to the data is increasingly a requirement within Research Data Management Plans.

The DOI system

A typical data DOI registered by the university looks like 10.5258/SOTON/D1234 (or https:/doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/D1234 expressed as a link). Once activated the latter should take you the 'landing page' for the DOI - e.g. the dataset record in ePrints Soton.

The first part of the DOI (10.5258) is common to all DOIs registered by the University of Southampton.

The second part (SOTON) is specific to the repository etc. that registered it.

The final part is specific to the dataset itself.

Request a DOI for your Dataset

We can register a DOI for your dataset through DataCite - this gives a persistent link and can make it easier to cite.

We will generally do this for datasets that will be cited in a publication, for other situations we will consider the request.