Open citations: 100 million DOIs created by Crossref, including 200,000 from OpenEdition!

Crossref, which is OpenEdition’s partner for registering DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) allocated to digital resources on its platforms, has just passed the milestone of 100 million registered DOIs. Having acquired more than 200,000 DOIs, OpenEdition welcomes this success, which is a condition for the citability of all scientific literature and the development of open citations within the OpenCitations project. OpenEdition is continuing its commitment to the process of assigning DOIs, conducting R&D projects to link all resources, and developing open citations.
A Digital Object Identifier is the very core of the mechanism for identifying digital resources, such as journals, scientific articles, reports, videos, and so on. DOIs are sometimes compared to ISSNs or ISBNs for the web, but they also act as an alternative to the instability of URLs by combining the location of a document and its related metadata.
A unique DOI is assigned to each resource and will not be reused. It is created by registering metadata related to the digital resource (journal name, digital ISSN or ISBN, URL, book publication date, language, title, author, publisher, etc.). If the URL of a document changes, its DOI does not change. Therefore, it remains permanently citable, since the DOI registers the new URL.

DOIs are managed by agencies (Crossref and DataCite, for example). OpenEdition has been attributing DOIs since 2009. To register these identifiers, OpenEdition has chosen CrossRef, the leading agency for the “research” sectors, journal articles, books, lectures, etc. CrossRef also oversees another major feature: crosslinking.
Applying for DOIs is subject to an annual subscription fee and a fee schedule. The costs are covered by OpenEdition. To date, over 200,000 DOIs have been purchased by OpenEdition.
Bilbo, the first OpenEdition Lab project, focused on the automatic recognition and structuring of bibliographic references in digital scientific documentation – whether in the form of structured bibliographies at the end of an article, footnotes, or quotations throughout a text. The purpose of Bilbo is to identify bibliographic references and to be able to link them to a DOI in order to allow navigation between different digital objects. To date, Bilbo has enriched our bibliographies by making 358,590 references clickable.
As part of its open science development policy, OpenEdition has joined the I4OC (Initiative for Open Quotes) movement, and actively contributes to the development of open citations, i.e. bibliographic references under an open licence. With over 330,000 articles and book chapters, OpenEdition will gradually contribute 3,200,000 open references to OpenCitations.
To find out more
- DOIs on OpenEdition: http://www.maisondesrevues.org/253
- OpenEdition research & development: https://lab.hypotheses.org/
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
OpenEdition team (October 1, 2018). Open citations: 100 million DOIs created by Crossref, including 200,000 from OpenEdition! Open Electronic Publishing. Retrieved February 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/si90