While all Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) aim to ensure long-term access, disambiguation and linkage in digital research ecosystems, the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) has emerged as the gold standard among them, particularly in scholarly communication, due to its widespread adoption, metadata richness, governance, and resolvability through a central infrastructure (Crossref, DataCite, etc.); however, the broader family of PIDs—which includes ORCID iDs for researchers, RORs for institutions, ARKs for archives, and Handles for diverse digital assets—play complementary roles, forming an interconnected framework that supports open science, FAIR principles, and global research interoperability; recent studies like Building the Plane as We Fly It (de Castro et al., 2023) and Meadows et al. (2019) stress that strategic PID infrastructure is essential for the robustness of the research data lifecycle, enabling provenance tracking, reproducibility, and system-level discoverability across repositories and nations; the DOI, however, holds specific value through its global resolution via doi.org, strong integration in citation workflows, reference managers, indexing services, and publishing platforms, and its embedded metadata which enhances semantic interoperability—qualities that make it more than just a PID but a normative cornerstone of scholarly attribution; still, context matters: in a biodiversity data system like DiSSCo, PIDs such as Handles or ARKs may serve better due to domain-specific flexibility and lower operational costs, while in academic publishing, DOIs dominate because of their tight coupling with journals, datasets, and citation standards; thus, it is not a question of supremacy but of fit-for-purpose hierarchy, where the DOI is a PID of high value, but not the only essential identifier in a multipolar infrastructure of research knowledge. de Castro, P., Herb, U., Rothfritz, L., & Schöpfel, J. (2023). Building the plane as we fly it: the promise of Persistent Identifiers. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7258286
