As announced in our
DOI press release we are delighted to be now assigning Digital Object Identifier (DOIs) to datasets of crystal structures deposited with CCDC. You may be familiar with the use of DOIs alongside article citations. These provide a persistent link that is guaranteed to take you to a page that provides metadata associated with an article and invariably a link to the article itself. Assigning an identifier such as a DOI reflects a desire for published content to be easily discoverable for the long term. CCDC believes that just as articles are worthy of citation, so too are the datasets that represent the primary output of the crystallographic community. We are not alone in this view as is evidenced by the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (
http://www.force11.org/datacitation) to which CCDC fully subscribes. These principles recognise the importance of data as a citable product of research for which credit and attribution is due. They also highlight attributes such as unique identification, access, persistence, versioning and interoperability which assigning DOIs can help facilitate.
