OAI Identifiers: Decentralised PIDs for Research Outputs in Repositor…

"An OAI (Open Archives Initiative) identifier is a unique identifier of a metadata record. OAI identifiers are used in the context of repositories using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), however, the process by which they are assigned can be, in principle, used more broadly elsewhere.

In comparison to DOIs, OAI identifiers are registered in a distributed rather than centralised manner and there is therefore no cost for minting them. OAI identifiers are persistent identifiers in repositories that declare their level of support for deleted documents in the deletedRecord element of the Identify response as persistent. CORE recommends repositories to provide this persistent level of support. OAI Identifiers are viable PIDs for repositories that can be, as opposed to DOIs, minted in a distributed fashion and cost-free, and which can be resolvable directly to the repository rather than to the publisher. This approach has the potential to increase the importance of repositories in the process of disseminating knowledge. CORE provides a global OAI Resolver built on top of the CORE research outputs aggregation system...."