Best practices for registering DOIs for living documents?

One of our clients is looking at publishing research protocols, which are expected to be updated several times over the course of the study before being finalised. It should be possible to access previous versions of the document, but all the versions are ultimately of the same document.

Am I right in thinking the best way to handle this will be to register a single DOI for the document and use Crossmark to track the different versions? Or should each version have a separate DOI?

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Hi @rhiannon-ppl ,

Thanks for your question and for posting it here for all to benefit from. Apologies for the slow response. I wanted to double check my answer with Patricia Feeney, our head of metadata, as she has more experience with research protocols than me.

For research protocols especially, it is crucial that a new DOI be created for each version so that citations and metadata reflect what is being cited.

We recommend that you register these as datasets. Here’s an example DOI from one of our members: https://doi.crossref.org/search/doi?pid=support@crossref.org&format=unixsd&doi=10.17504%2Fprotocols.io.qg4dtyw

And, another dataset XML sample that might be helpful: NURSA Datasets

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Warm regards,
Isaac

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