When you submit metadata to OSTI about a dataset, you are basically “announcing” that it exists and you are describing it.  That’s why you will see the name of the basic submittal tool for data referred to as “Announcement Notice 241.6.”  Note that the DOE Data ID Service does not accept the dataset itself; only the metadata is submitted.  The metadata loads into the OSTI processing system  called Energy Link, or E-Link for short.  After processing the metadata, assigning a DOI to the dataset wherever it resides, and registering the DOI with DataCite, your DOI goes “live.”  Multiple benefits are provided to data creators and project leads, authors, data holding organizations, and to searchers looking for data for any reason.

• Announcing and registering datasets with DOIs enables researchers, especially future researchers, to more easily discover the data, access it, and reuse it for verification of the original experiment or to produce new results with the latest methods.
  
  

• Because of the responsibilities a submitter must meet in order to have DOIs assigned for datasets, users seeing those DOIs know the information has a level of integrity and commitment backing it that becomes part of its provenance.
  
  

• DOIs facilitate accurate linkage between a document or published article and the specific datasets underlying it.
  
  

• Datasets that have been announced and registered become searchable in OSTI's databases, including SciTech Connect and DOE Data Explorer. Users of these databases are linked to the dataset at the data center or facility where it resides; this increases the opportunity for discovery of additional data, specialized interfaces, toolkits for data analysis, etc.
  
  

• Because OSTI is the operating agent for Science.gov and World Wide Science.org, datasets become searchable there also; and, due to the agreements OSTI has in place with commercial search engines such as Google, your data becomes visible to their users as well.
  
  

• DOIs make data easy to cite in a standardized way (DOIs have become recognizable as pointers to important information around the globe), encouraging authors to include this step in their writing/publishing activities.
  
  

• Enabling your datasets to be easily citable means that data creators, contributors, data centers, and others involved in the data, but not necessarily in the authoring of a publication, can receive proper attribution.
  
  

• DOIs are designed to be more stable and persistent links than normal URLs.  Registering the DOI with an international organization such as DataCite provides global resolving and the prospect of steadily increasing visibility of your research as third-party services (such as the Data Citation Index) automatically pull and index your dataset.