From April 2021 all content published on the ACAMH website will be assigned a Digital Object Identifier, or a DOI. As the American Psychological Association describes, a ‘DOI is like a digital fingerprint: each article receives a unique one at birth, and it can be used to identify the article throughout its lifespan, no matter where it goes’.1 Whether a video, a blog, a topic guide or any of the other myriad content published on the ACAMH website, they will all now be indexed in CrossRef, a consortium of around 3,000 publishers, and be assigned a stable link in the form of a DOI that will allow the content to be easily identifiable and searchable despite any change in its location and other metadata that may occur in the future, including the URL becoming broken, and will enable the material to be perfectly accessible for long-term use.
Not only is this incredibly useful for users and readers who will be able to search for items published by ACAMH with only the need of a DOI rather than having to provide additional information to their search such as an author name, title, date of publication etc., but further, this exciting development is particularly valuable for authors publishing on the ACAMH website. As a unique identifier, a DOI is incorporated into the citation of materials and remains persistent over time, serving as a ‘guaranteed location for the item cited because it will always resolve to the right web address’.2 Having a DOI assigned to all content published on the ACAMH website will increase the visibility and discoverability of the authors’ work and allow for it to be more easily citable, for having a DOI creates an unambiguous data citation for the material and serves as an incredibly reliable way of tracking data citations.
We are pleased that this development marks another step in the continued efforts of ACAMH to ensure crucial work continuously being carried out in the field of child and adolescent mental health is more easily read and disseminated as widely as possible.
1 https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2014/07/how-to-use-the-new-doi-format-in-apa-style.html [last accessed: 24/06/2020]
2 https://blogs.libraries.indiana.edu/scholcomm/2017/10/05/why-doi/ [last accessed: 24/06/2020]
Discussion
Highly appreciable. Thanks personally for posting the news on LinkedIn, to know the site where I would like to write on issues of child health issues especially regarding mental and psychological issue.