Davidson, Lloyd A., and Kimberly Douglas. 1998. “Digital Object Identifiers: Promise and Problems for Scholarly Publishing.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing 4 (2).
This 1998 article “Digital Object Identifiers: Promise and Problems for Scholarly Publishing,” offers a detailed account of the early development and institutionalization of the DOI system. Drawing from events in the mid-1990s, the authors provide historical insights into the founding of the International DOI Foundation (IDF), including its original mission statement: “to ensure that the system meets the needs of publishers.” This explicit prioritization of commercial publisher interests was later quietly removed from the IDF website, signaling both the original orientation of the DOI toward protecting publishing industry profitability and the subsequent effort to obscure these origins.
This document serves as a key artifact within my data essay ("Who Owns Our Knowledge Infrastructure: Demystifying the Politics of the DOI"). This text is particularly useful for tracing how the DOI system was intentionally designed to serve the commercial imperatives of major publishers, embedding those interests directly into the governance and technical architecture of scholarly communication.
Source
Davidson, Lloyd A., and Kimberly Douglas. 1998. “Digital Object Identifiers: Promise and Problems for Scholarly Publishing.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing 4 (2). https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0004.203.
Lloyd Davidson and Kimberly Douglas, "Davidson, Lloyd A., and Kimberly Douglas. 1998. “Digital Object Identifiers: Promise and Problems for Scholarly Publishing.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing 4 (2).", contributed by Angela Okune, Research Data Share, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 7 July 2025, accessed 1 April 2026. https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/davidson-lloyd-and-kimberly-douglas-1998-“digital-object-identifiers-promise-and-problems
Critical Commentary
This 1998 article “Digital Object Identifiers: Promise and Problems for Scholarly Publishing,” offers a detailed account of the early development and institutionalization of the DOI system. Drawing from events in the mid-1990s, the authors provide historical insights into the founding of the International DOI Foundation (IDF), including its original mission statement: “to ensure that the system meets the needs of publishers.” This explicit prioritization of commercial publisher interests was later quietly removed from the IDF website, signaling both the original orientation of the DOI toward protecting publishing industry profitability and the subsequent effort to obscure these origins.
This document serves as a key artifact within my data essay ("Who Owns Our Knowledge Infrastructure: Demystifying the Politics of the DOI"). This text is particularly useful for tracing how the DOI system was intentionally designed to serve the commercial imperatives of major publishers, embedding those interests directly into the governance and technical architecture of scholarly communication.