FreeDOI

FreeDOI is where the concept of freedom meets the concept of DOI. It is a free and open-source service that allows you to create DOI-like identifiers for your digital objects. The identifiers are designed to be persistent and resolvable, and they can be used to cite your digital objects in any context.

How it works

Whereas a DOI is a unique identifier that is assigned to a digital object by a registration agency in scholarly contexts for a fee, a FreeDOI is a unique identifier that you can create for your digital object of any kind for free. Whether you are a researcher, a developer, a designer, a writer, or a creator of any kind, you can use FreeDOI to create a FreeDOI for your digital object and share it with others. Your domain changes, your hosting changes, your URL changes, but your FreeDOI can be updated to point to the new location of your digital object.

Making a FreeDOI

FreeDOIs are created by combining three elements: a prefix, a suffix and an identifier.

While all "original" DOIs start with a prefix of 10., FreeDOIs start with a prefix between 20. and 29., which roughly identifies the type of digital object. The prefix is followed by a suffix, which is a unique number of at least four digits, assigned to you by FreeDOI. Lastly, the identifier is a alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies your digital object.

For example, if you are a researcher, you can request a suffix under the prefix 20.. Let's say you are assigned the suffix 1234. You can then create a FreeDOI for your research paper with the identifier my-paper. The resulting FreeDOI would be 20.1234/my-paper. Add the URL of your digital object to the FreeDOI, and you have a persistent identifier that you can use to cite your research paper - because if the URL changes, you can simply update it on FreeDOI to point to the new location of your research paper.

Remote resolution

If you're a larger organization, you may want to operate your own resolver for your suffix. In this case, instead of setting up identifiers in your FreeDOI account, you can simply configure your entire suffix to point to your resolver. If you're assigned 20.1234, a request to https://freedoi.org/20.1234/my-paper might redirect to https://resolver.your-organization.org/my-paper, where you can handle the final resolution of the identifier.

Note that we strongly recommend that you use the FreeDOI service for setting up identifiers instead of operating your own resolver, as we will take care of the maintenance and uptime of the resolver for you. We have APIs in place that allow you to programmatically create and update FreeDOIs in addition to the web interface.

Resolving a FreeDOI

To resolve a FreeDOI, simply visit https://freedoi.org/20.1234/my-paper in your browser. The FreeDOI resolver will redirect you to the URL of the digital object that is associated with the FreeDOI.

License

FreeDOI is licensed under the MIT License.