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At the recent ISO TC46 meeting in Washington, the DOI System was accepted as a formal work item to become an ISO standard. This standardisation will be within TC46/SC9, the ISO body responsible for "information content identifiers" such as ISBN, ISSN, ISTC, ISRC, etc. The formal approved resolution reads:

"SC 9 invites the International DOI Foundation to submit a formal proposal and preliminary draft for an ISO standard on the Digital Object Identifier.

SC 9 further invites the International DOI Foundation to nominate a Project Leader for this work and authorizes the SC 9 Secretariat to establish a new Working Group for this project if such WG is deemed necessary after consultation with the Project Leader."

The IDF will be the nominated registration authority for this standard. The DOI system uses several existing standards-based components which have been brought together and further developed to provide a consistent system: the standardisation within ISO (ISO TC46/SC9) will use these underlying standards as normative references, and therefore will be a relatively concise summary. It will: codify a top level description of components; refer to those components (Syntax, Handle, Data Dictionary) as normative references; separate the existing "DOI Handbook" into formal standard (ISO) and operating manual; provide further assurances to users on governance and intent through ISO conformance; and show that DOI supports (does not compete with) other identifier schemes, offering the option of adding Internet actionability in a standard way.

For further information please contact n.paskin@doi.org or the ISO/TC46/SC9 Secretariat at iso.tc46.sc9@lac-bac.gc.ca.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has announced the use of DOIs at the level of individual tables. OECD's StatLink is an electronic publishing solution that enables links between publications, whether they are in print or e-book format, and the underlying data in MS Excel spreadsheets. StatLink uses DOIs for identifying published material on line. DOI-based links are added to the charts and tables in OECD books and e-books: clicking the link at a table downloads a matching Excel spreadsheet.

For more information, see http://www.oecd.org/statistics/statlink.

The IDF participated in a recent National Information Standards Organization/Digital Library Federation special meeting on DLF's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) to discuss the results of the DLF ERMI and to outline possible next steps for stakeholders. IDF's focus was on the need for, and availability of, tools for interoperability. This will be followed up by the NISO/EDItEUR meeting on electronic communication of license and rights terms as a satellite of the London Online meeting on Dec 2, at which these tools will be described in detail.

For further information on ERMI see http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/home.html.

For further information on the Dec meeting in London, see http://www.niso.org/pdfs/bici-niso-seminar04.pdf.

At the recent international CODATA meeting on "Publication and Citation of Scientific Data" a number of projects were presented for the use of DOIs as an interoperable common system for identification of science data. Two current projects were presented: the TIB project (on citation of primary data sets) and the Names for Life project (on biological taxonomy). At the meeting, discussions were also opened as to the use of DOI with the recently developed IUPAC-NIST Chemical Identifier, and in other projects.

For further information see "Digital Object Identifiers for scientific data" at http://www.doi.org/topics/041110CODATAarticleDOI.pdf.