Parent issue: Improving the scholarly reputation of the RFC Series
Specific issue: DOI assignments to all RFC

Size (time): 3-4 months
Importance/Urgency: Med/Low


Problem Statement:  When documenting authored publications, researchers often rely on Digital Object Identifiers ([[http://www.doi.org/]]) to find, cite, and report on their publication activity.  In some cases, publications do not count as professional publications if a DOI is not assigned.  In order to encourage the reputation and value of the Series to academic researchers, adding DOIs to all published RFCs is being considered as a possibility.  Using DOIs to uniquely identify publications is considered a standard best practice among the scientific, technical, and medical publishing community.


RSE Actions:
  * Determine cost and potential value
  * Present business case and high level project plan to RSOC
  * Work with John Levine on DOI draft (see [[http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-levine-doi/]])


RSOC Actions:
  * review plan, approve membership with CrossRef.org


RFC Production Center & Publisher Actions:
  * Determine what programming will be required
  * Help create project plan
  * Code changes to include information in database, create necessary APIs to register DOI numbers with CrosRef
  * Adjust Procedures Manual accordingly


Costs/Benefits
Financial: 
  * From EZID - http://n2t.net/ezid
    * "An annual subscription for a non-profit organization is $2,500 per year. This entitles the organization to up to 1 million identifiers per year, both DOIs and ARKs. You would have a unique prefix assigned to your organization"
  * From CrossRef - http://www.crossref.org

   CrossRef Fees, initial
   Annual Fee = $275
   Deposit Fee (2012-2014) = (610 * 1.00) = $610 
   Deposit Fee (pre-2012) = (6491 * .15) = $973.65
   Total est. for of January 1, 2014 = $1913.65
   Ongoing = $330 (annual fee) + $350 (total yearly deposit fee)

While a subscription service is possible for $2500/year, given the number of RFC's published (approx 350/year) a per document service like CrossRef.org makes more sense for the Series.

Project schedules: 

Reputation: goal is to improve the overall reputation of the series

Estimated completion date: TBD

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Note on API for EZID
The API documentation is here: http://n2t.net/ezid/doc/apidoc.html
 
The API test user account
user name: apitest
password: apitest
 
This is a shared account, and the identifiers created are subject to deletion after 2 weeks.