DOI for ArcGIS Story Maps

DataCite Chat Room
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I just received a request to assign a DOI to an ArcGIS Story Map (specifically this one, if you’re interested: The House of Mary - Ephesus).

It seems that ESRI does not issue DOIs themselves and has posted about this back in 2018 at Making Story Maps Citable (e.g., with Digital Object Identifiers).

What is described in that blog post is using a general repository to post a pdf of the interactive story map in order to get a DOI. That seems unsatisfactory to me, since the DOI would point to the repository page with the pdf. The examples provided of this are a decidedly inferior experience than the story maps themselves. It wasn’t even obvious that there was an interactive website.

Issuing the DOI to the story map, probably as “interactive resource”, seems a better approach, but our policy is that we only issue DOIs for content on servers at our institution. Unless we are working with a DataCite service provider, like we are doing with Redivis.

Anyone else have any experience with this? I’m going to talk with our geospatial manager as well to see what he knows from ESRI that might be more current and how much demand there might be for this. But there are usually lots of good ideas from this community!

Thanks.

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Hi Amy - the best practice is to only assign DOIs to content that is actively hosted or managed by your institution - whether that means it is hosted on your servers, or you are working with a service provider that offers a hosted solution. In this case, if I understand correctly, ESRI/ArcGIS is hosting content that was deposited by an individual researcher, but is not managed by Stanford, so we would not recommend assigning a DOI.

The solution suggested by ESRI could be appropriate to capture a copy/web archive of what the story map looked like at a specific point in time, minus the interactivity. However, I would consider this DOI to be assigned to the PDF copy, rather than to the interactive story map itself. A PDF copy should not be deposited solely to get a DOI for citation of the story map.

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Thanks, Kelly. That maps perfectly to my thoughts as well.

Ideally, StoryMaps would offer DOIs. I know someone who works there and we’ll check in with them to see if they are thinking about this at all.

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