Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A repository minting a DataCite DOI upon final publication of a dataset.
- Is an instance
A publisher minting a Crossref DOI for an article at the journal's acceptance stage so the DOI can appear in the published PDF.
Editorial commentary
Minting is the create operation in a persistent identifier’s lifecycle — mint, resolve, update, tombstone — and it is normally the one step a researcher cannot do directly. Across every major PID scheme, minting is delegated to a registered organisation acting under a naming authority: a Crossref- or DataCite-member institution mints DOIs through the provider’s member API, an ARK Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN) holder mints ARKs, and an ORCID-affiliated system triggers registration of an ORCID iD on a researcher’s behalf. See Identifier scheme for what defines who holds that minting authority in the first place.
What has to exist before an identifier can be minted
Every scheme requires a minimum metadata payload at the moment of minting — see PID metadata — and DataCite’s own workflow makes this explicit through three identifier states: a Draft DOI is reserved but not yet registered with the Handle system and does not resolve; a Registered DOI resolves but is not indexed in DataCite’s public search; a Findable DOI is both resolvable and discoverable. Best practice is to mint as early as practical — often before public release, so the identifier can be embedded in the record itself — while treating full metadata completeness as a condition of moving an identifier to findable, not an afterthought.
Minting vs. curation
Not every PID scheme delegates minting outward the same way. DOI and Handle minting is decentralised across thousands of member organisations, each responsible for its own metadata quality. ROR takes the opposite approach: a single central curation team mints each ROR ID as part of reviewing and approving an inclusion request, rather than opening minting to member self-service — see ROR curation for that workflow. The two models trade off differently: decentralised minting scales to millions of identifiers a year but pushes metadata-quality control onto thousands of individual minters; centralised minting keeps quality consistent but makes the curation team the throughput bottleneck.
See Persistent data identifier for how this plays out specifically for datasets.
References
- DataCite, ‘DOI Registration’ documentation.
- Crossref, ‘Content Registration’ documentation.
Also known as
DOI minting · Identifier minting
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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