Acronym of Digital Object Identifier. It consits of a character string with a defined syntax, that provides a persitent and unique identification of an electronic document. It thus makes the document accessible and linkable independently from its url or metadata, that may change.
The document can be found in the Internet using the DOI resolver at www.doi.org or simply writing the string http://doi.org before the DOI itself.
The governance of the system is a non-profit organization, the International DOI Foundation, working with many different registration agencies.
