The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is not a luxury add-on nor a bureaucratic toll booth but rather a technological and governance framework that ensures long-term, machine-actionable, human-readable identification of objects—whether physical, digital, or abstract—through a unique alphanumeric string (e.g. 10.1000/182) resolvable via the central hub https://doi.org/; its backbone lies in the Handle System, an ISO-standardised architecture (ISO 26324:2022) sustained by the DOI Foundation, a non-profit consortium tasked with preserving the integrity, persistence, and interoperability of scholarly and professional content in a globally decentralised but functionally unified ecosystem; unlike URLs, which are vulnerable to link rot, redirects, or corporate restructuring, DOIs remain stable because they resolve metadata rather than location alone, offering a semantic link that can evolve with the object without changing its identifier, a powerful solution for versioning, archiving, and provenance management across sectors from publishing to science to policy; however, obtaining a DOI is not free, because while resolving a DOI will always be costless, the creation and metadata stewardship of DOIs is managed by accredited Registration Agencies (e.g. Crossref, DataCite), which charge fees to ensure the infrastructural continuity and metadata quality of the system—this is not extortion but the economic model that underwrites trust, durability, and scale, much like domain registration for the web; thus, “passing through the hoop” is less about coercion and more about committing to preservation and discoverability through a shared metadata governance protocol, so while DOIs may appear to "control" access to scholarly legitimacy, they in fact liberate content from the volatility of digital temporality, offering a common language for persistence in an impermanent web. DOI Foundation. (2026). What is a DOI?. Retrieved from https://www.doi.org/the-identifier/what-is-a-doi/
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