Identifiers for earth science data sets: Where we have been and where we need to go

Among persistent identifiers, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) stand out quite prominently, with approximately 133 million DOIs assigned to various objects as of February 2017. While the assignment of DOIs to objects such as scientific publications has been in place for many years, their assignment to Earth science data sets is more recent.

Applying persistent identifiers to data sets enables improved tracking of their use and reuse, facilitates the crediting of data producers, and aids reproducibility through associating research with the exact data set(s) used. Maintaining provenance – i.e., tracing back lineage of significant scientific conclusions to the entities (data sets, algorithms, instruments, satellites, etc.) that lead to the conclusions, would be prohibitive without persistent identifiers.