For Individual Lab Researchers – Submit metadata to your lab’s internal STI system or your lab’s STI Manager | OSTI, US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Call or email your organization’s Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Manager.
Explain your need to submit a dataset to support a publication and/or to receive a DOI. Ask if your lab has been assigned a unique DOI prefix. The answer should be “yes.” If it is not, the STI Manager will need to contact OSTI to obtain a prefix and then get back to you.
Labs may have different procedures for announcing the dataset to OSTI’s E-Link system. You may be asked to meet with the STI Manager to allow the staff to log in to their E-Link account and enter the metadata on your behalf. Or, you may be asked to submit metadata via an input screen internal to your lab. The completed input would then flow to the lab’s designated repository or database and, from there, to OSTI.
Your STI Manager should always ask you these questions and help you resolve any issues related to the questions before input begins:
- Will your data be publicly available now or in the near-term?
- What data will be treated as datasets for which you want DOIs and which parts will be simply components or files within those datasets and automatically covered by the datasets' DOIs.
- Where will your datasets reside? Obtaining a DOI requires that you've placed them in a location (such as a data center or institutional repository) that will maintain them indefinitely.
- Do you have appropriate landing pages for each dataset?
- How would you characterize the content of each of your datasets: numeric data, genome data, images or multimedia, etc.?
You should know your assigned DOI immediately, but within the next day or so, check OSTI’s databases or DataCite to ensure that the DOI minted correctly.