The First Recipient: The DOI for Scholarly Publishing
The Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact recognizes an aspect of the scholarly publishing ecosystem that has had a lasting impact, having become indispensable today. Over the past three decades, since its adoption by Crossref, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) has been a critical feature of the connective ecosystem for scholarly outputs of all types.
DOIs ensure that research objects are always discoverable, even if web structures change or content moves. This is extremely important for researchers and the integrity of the scholarly ecosystem. The availability of DOI metadata facilitates many other back-end information management systems, such as holdings and appropriate-copy resolution via related standards such as OpenURL. Simplified reference management tools, assessment measurement, new forms of relational search, and other applications centered on DOI metadata were built upon this infrastructure. The DOI system soon extended into new domains, such as DataCite’s identification of data sets.
By driving attention to the value of persistent linking and a robust resolution service, the DOI for Scholarly Publishing has vastly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of scholarly communications. The Governing Committee therefore agreed unanimously that the DOI for Scholarly Publishing Impact was the obvious choice as the inaugural recipient of the Rosenblum Award.