A blog entry on the DOI’s potential and Threaded Publications. BioMed Central Bolg.

DOIs are strongly associated with enabling digital scholarly content to be formally cited in journal article reference lists, and therefore for academics to gain credit for the work assigned a DOI. Not all scientists need understand DOIs, but all scientists understand citation. The growing practice of assigning DOIs to scientific datasets and other non-paper-based scholarly outputs is partly driven by the need to incentivize more scientists, through the potential for more citations, to publish their work.