In 2011, the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) joined DataCite to facilitate citing, accessing, and reusing publicly available scientific research datasets produced by DOE-funded researchers.  DataCite is an international organization that supports data visibility, ease of data citation in scholarly publications, data preservation and future re-use, and data access and retrievability.  DataCite members help achieve these goals by assigning persistent identifiers such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets.

OSTI now assigns DOIs to datasets submitted by DOE and its contractor and grantee researchers and registers the DOIs with DataCite.  These datasets support the technical reports and published literature resulting from DOE's research.  They are also recognized as valuable information entities in their own right that, now and in the future, need to be available for citation, discovery, retrieval, and reuse.

The DOE Data ID Service is a useful tool for increasing access to digital data, as the DOE Public Access Plan noted:  “The Department’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information can provide Digital Object Identifiers to datasets resulting from DOE-funded research.  To improve the discoverability of and attribution for datasets created and used in the course of the research, DOE encourages the citation and identification of datasets with persistent identifiers such as DOIs.”