I represent a new consortium, and we are getting ready to publish our first technical report written by several of our members – each represents a different institution. However, one of the authors’ associated university already assigned a DOI to the draft report. What is the best way to address this situation without creating a duplicate DOI?
As you might expect, the other authors are not happy about this institution “owning” the report.
Hi, and thanks for your question.
Generally, we’d consider a draft version of the report, situated in a completely different context, to be a distinctly citable object from the version-of-record report that you’ll be publishing. So, in that situation, it’s appropriate that there are two distinct DOIs.
It’s a similar situation to a preprint paper and the eventual VoR journal article it becomes. We consider those to be two different objects. Since they would be cited differently, they should have distinct DOIs.
In contrast, a VoR journal article, and then a copy of that same article (after editing and peer-review, with the relevant journal and issue information to contextualize it) later hosted in an institutional repository would be the same citable object, so the repository should not register a distinct DOI.
It’s a common source of confusion. A ‘preprint’ or ‘draft’ versus a ‘postprint’ or ‘author accepted manuscript’ seem like they should be handled the same way when it comes to persistent identifiers, but they’re really different scenarios.
I hope that helps clarify. Let me know if you have any other questions.
-Shayn
Super helpful. Thank you!