To improve the visibility of Austrian researchers and their academic performance, TU Wien Bibliothek is leading two national initiatives: the DOI Service Austria and ORCID Austria. Not only should this raise awareness of the significance of persistent identifiers (PIDs) in academic communication, it should also create a community of practice.

DOI Service Austria

Since January 2020, with the DOI Service Austria, TU Wien Bibliothek has been providing all Austrian universities, research institutions and other non-profit organisations in the research and education sector domiciled in Austria with an attractive opportunity to register and use Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to ensure stable retrieval of academic output via the internet.

For the first time, there is a central point of contact in Austria providing advice on the subject of DOIs, organising international developments and relaying information promptly to Austrian institutions. In order to be able to provide this service as a local authority, TU Wien Bibliothek is a member of the DataCite Association. DataCite is a DOI provider that focuses specifically on the persistent identification of objects stored in repositories and relies on uniform metadata.

Why use DOIs? DOIs are recognised and used internationally. The use of DOIs for research output published on the internet ensures reliable citations and promotes the visibility and stable findability of the document on the internet. The use of DOIs together with other persistent identifiers, such as ORCID iDs for authors and ROR for institutions, also enables improved, reliable and stable attribution of research output to particular persons, research facilities and institutions.

The DOI Service Austria enables Austrian institutions to use the Fabrica, opens an external URL in a new window registration platform and the DataCite interfaces (MDS API, opens an external URL in a new window, REST API, opens an external URL in a new window): this enables both manual and automatic registration of DOIs. Customers of the DOI Service Austria receive the prefixes from us for the independent DOI assignment in the respective institutional repositories. TU Wien Bibliothek provides technical support as well as support for the quality assurance of metadata in Austrian information systems and the interoperability between IT applications. Fees for the DOI Service Austria are based on the DataCite cost model. Contact us for more details.

ORCID Austria

In January 2019, ORCID Austria was founded as a consortium of interested Austrian research and research funding institutions, led by TU Wien - represented by TU Wien Bibliothek - together with the University of Vienna. One of the key aims of this consortium is to establish the ORCID iD as the primary unique personal identifier for researchers in Austria. To implement this successfully, the lead institutions offer both local technical and administrative support. Workshops and webinars on ORCID iD and the use of persistent identifiers are held regularly at TU Wien Bibliothek.