A Practical Guide to Automating the Digital Supply Chain with the Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

As far back as 1994-95, when the advent of the Web led publishers to recognize that at some point they would have to migrate significant amounts of their print content to the online world, two concerns were paramount: the need to protect copyright in the digital environment, and more generally, the need to facilitate interoperability among the many different systems and vendors involved in the digital distribution of content. Not coincidentally, the first publishers to recognize this were the publishers of peer-reviewed scientific journals, because their customer community was the same community from which the Internet itself, and later the Web, sprang: the university and corporate research community.