Digital object identifiers

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier used in scholarly publishing to identify and link to a piece of work.  DOIs are considered by numerous journals to be mandatory for citation and can be assigned to datasets, preprints, research articles, websites, and other scholarly works. Since the practice of preprinting is quickly on the rise across all disciplines \cite{berg2016preprints}, and since funding bodies are finally realizing the importance of preprinting (here's a recent example by the NIH), it is crucial that preprints get identified by a reliable standard: the DOI. The article you are reading was written on Authorea and it was preprinted with DOI (https://dx.doi.org/10.22541/au.149693987.70506124). The arXiv of the future is a database of preprints identified by DOI.