WHO IS THE DOI FOUNDATION COMMUNITY?
We are an international community of communities bound by a common interest in persistent infrastructure. So far, we have welcomed agencies that manage communities spanning entertainment, standards, the built environment, natural history collections, scholarly communications, and research data.
Read more about our Registration Agencies and what they offer
WHAT IS THE DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI)?
A DOI name is a digital identifier of an object, any object — physical, digital, or abstract. DOIs solve a common problem: keeping track of things. Things can be matter, material, content, or activities.
Designed to be used by humans as well as machines, DOIs identify objects persistently. They allow things to be uniquely identified and accessed reliably. You know what you have, where it is, and others can track it too.
Read more about the identifier, its benefits, and how it’s used
DOI Proxy Milestone
In December 2025, we passed the 3 Billion proxy resolution mark with a total of 3,071,362,438 resolutions for the month. Proxy resolutions have steadily increased over the years but nevertheless this is a significant milestone. To put it into perspective, it means that DOIs are resolved more than 1146 times a second or say it another way a DOI is resolved at the doi.org proxy once every 0.37 microseconds.
We know that a lot of this usage comes from machines rather than humans but we can’t be sure how much. 19% of this usage comes from machines that have identified themselves as such but we’re pretty sure this is a low estimate of the amount of machine use.
This astonishing level of proxy use is a tribute to our resilient and scalable infrastructure that was built and is maintained by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) on our behalf.
How many are being resolved?
The total DOI resolutions to date is calculated using actual number of DOI resolutions recorded up until yesterday and the average resolution rate recorded over the past 24 hours (currently this is )
Try resolving a DOI name
10.) and a suffix, separated by a forward slash (/). Prefacing the DOI with doi.org/ will turn it into an actionable link, for example, https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-040. Clicking that link will ‘resolve’ it, i.e. redirect to the latest information about the object it identifies, even if the object changes or moves.