DOI assignment

Make your digital resources clearly identifiable and permanently traceable.

Persistent Identifiers / Persistent Identifiers (PID) have become established for the unique identification of digital resources. PIDs are permanent, location-independent, globally valid, addressable (citable) and clickable (resolvable). URLs are not suitable for a permanent and unambiguous scientific citation of scientific publications or research data on the Internet.

The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is very common for research data.

Apply for DOI

As a researcher at the University of Cologne you can apply for a DOI. We offer a service for the registration of DataCite DOIs for your research data. The data must be hosted on a server which is located within the domain of the University of Cologne (.uni-koeln.de).

Please send an e-mail to with the following information:

•     The URL where the data set or similar can be found
•     An XML file that contains the essential metadata that describes the record as a digital resource. The XML file corresponds to the DataCite schema. You can use this DOI Metadata Generator to generate the XML metadata description
•     The requested DOI must comply with the following syntax:
      10.18716/KKK/BBBB
  • 10.18716 is the prefix of the UzK
  • KKK is a string assigned by the USB DOI service,
  • BBBB is a character string that you can assign to the data record as required. Allowed are alphanumeric characters "a-z", "A-Z", "0-9" and "-._;()/".

If you have any questions, please also use the central e-mail address .