The use of DOIs aligns with key parts of NTL's role as defined in the 2012 Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), including mandates to:
- Acquire, preserve and manage transportation information and information products and services for use by US Department of Transportation (US DOT), other Federal agencies, and the public.
- Publicize, facilitate and promote access to information products and services.
- Serve as coordinator and policy lead for transportation information access.
- Serve as a central repository for DOT research results and technical publications.
By incorporating DOIs, NTL is continuing its mission to make data available to the public and help increase data sharing in the community. An overview of NTL's research process and public access work flow can be seen below.
The integration of DOIs into NTL’s workflow can be seen in two major parts of the Plan to Increase Public Access to the Results of Federally-Funded Scientific Research Results, 7.2 Before Research Begins and 7.4.2 Data. These parts of the plan go into detail about the requirements that NTL has outlined to increase public access and data sharing, of which DOIs play an important part.
7.2 Before Research Begins
“DOT will:…
·Consistent with emerging Committee on Financial Assistance Reform (COFAR) requirements, establish a framework for tracking the lifecycle of the DOT research portfolio at the project level through unique project identifiers.
· Use digital object identifiers (DOI) to individually identify each Publication and Digital Data Set, to allow for correlation between associated Publications and supporting Digital Data Sets.
· Require all researchers to obtain and report his or her unique ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)7 identification on submissions of research results to DOT and/or publishers.”
7.4.2 Data
In reference to data depositing requirements:
“·The ability of the repository to provide persistent identifiers for Digital Data Sets and the standards that a repository should follow for implementation of those identifiers.”
This section further addresses that DOT data management plans will include a section that addresses plans for citation, archiving and preservation and that all datasets will need to be given a DOI.
DOIs are a key part of the curation process at NTL. For more information consult NTL's Digital Curation Policy.
