Why do geodetic data need DOI and what do I have to keep in mind when minting them?

The use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for scientific data and scientific software is increasingly common practice in many disciplines, including in Geodesy. Today, DOI-referenced datasets are fully citable in scholarly literature and more and more journals require the public availability of data underlying scientific results and their citation in research articles. Technical implementations, like Scholix (a framework for Scholarly Link Exchange) enable direct links between literature and data and support the visibility of research data. Key elements for enabling these links and for interconnecting publications with data, code, persons, institutions, etc., and are resolvable persistent identifier (PID), that should be included in the DOI metadata. Geodetic services of the International Association for Geodesy (IAG) are international key player for geodetic data provision and distribution. Their operating institutions and funding agencies increasingly require the provision of tangible data use and access statistics. Credit through citation was a major reason for the IAG’s Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) to establish a Working Group on using DOI for geodetic data sets (GGOS DOI WG) and for the working group members. The GGOS DOI WG was established in 2019 and includes international representatives of IAG Services and geodetic data centres as well as associated members that aims at developing best practices and recommendations for the consistent implementation of DOIs across all IAG Services and in the greater geodetic community. This presentation will give an update on recent group activities and on the status of DOI minting for geodetic datasets across IAG Services