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DOIs are persistent, unique identifiers that are increasingly becoming a standard method to help identify research objects. They give a digital ‘footprint’ that follows the research object throughout its lifespan, regardless of where it is physically hosted. A workshop was held in April 2019 at the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) Secretariat in Victoria, Seychelles called by the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) as part of the “Fisheries and aquaculture” use case of the European OpenAire-Connect H2020 project. The aim of this ‘use case’ is to publish the publicly-accessible IOTC documents that are of scientific interest to the “Fisheries and aquaculture” community on the open-access data repository, Zenodo (i.e. assign digital object identifiers, or DOIs to IOTC documents). Zenodo is an open-access data repository developed under the OpenAIRE project, operated by CERN, and supported by the European Commission, which assigns DOIs to research objects free of charge. The product focus of Zenodo is on datasets, codes (e.g. linked via Github repositories), publications, presentations (i.e. slides), and other research objects. A workflow was established to 1) filtering IOTC documents according to an agreed upon selection criteria; 2) validate the selected documents by the IOTC Secretariat; 3) publish the documents on Zenodo/Zenodo Sandbox and obtain a DOI for each; and finally 4) publish the assigned DOIs on the IOTC website. Of the 6124 documents derived from the IOTC website and defined as an appropriate document type for the scientific community, 3314 documents were retained for subsequent publication on Zenodo following the selection criteria. Validation of the documents was limited due to time constraints of the Secretariat and the duration of the OpenAire project (ended the 30th of June 2019). Within the timeframe of the project, 601 documents, including meeting reports and executive summaries, were published on Zenodo (~18% of the total filtered documents). The short-term objective of this project remains the complete validation by the IOTC and publication on Zenodo of the documents identified by this project as appropriate for the scientific community. The long-term objective of this project is to publish IOTC documents each year, following a standard protocol. The protocol and codes for the filtering and publication steps are complete and published (R code available at aenieblas/Zenodo_DOI_IOTC). The objective of this paper is to introduce working party participants to the concept of DOI, the benefits of DOIs and the workflow of assigning DOIs to future IOTC documents of working parties and meetings. A next step is to discuss a strategy to continue publication of IOTC documents on Zenodo in the future.
