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The DOI was launched in 1998, initiated by a collaborative effort of several trade associations (one in the United States, two international in scope) in the text publishing sector, to provide an extensible infrastructure for digital management of content - initially as a tool for naming digital content for publishers, although from the outset designed as a generic tool. The impetus for its creation was the recognition of the need for an equivalent in the digital world to highly successful identifier schemes such as ISBN for books and physical barcodes for consumer goods, rather than reliance solely on unmanaged systems such as URLs. Almost immediately after the introduction of the first popular Web browser in 1993, the side effects on information management of disappearing links (changed URLs) became apparent. (Examples are commonplace: in their 1999 report on "Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources", Ross and Gow used 199 online references. In 2003, perhaps ironically less than 32% of these resources remain accessible.) The recognition of this problem led, in 1995, to the first major effort to make resource discovery easier: the Dublin Core initiative. The activity of 1998 - 2000 considered interoperable data across all e - commerce media, for all purposes, not just resource discovery; it has been widely recognized as influential and developed into a key tool. An earlier but related activity, which soon became key to DOI, was discussed in the paper by Kahn and Wilensky on digital objects, where they examined the concepts of identifiers (handles) and reconceptualizing the Net from the movement of data packets to the management of information. The Kahn - Wilensky paper, in turn resulted from the earlier work by Kahn et al. at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives on the basic digital object idea, which led to the development of the Handle System.

The DOI system is deployed via Registration Agencies (RAS) who are empowered to assign DOIS for a community under the aegis of the IDF. Growing numbers of RAS have been appointed, in the United States, Australasia and Europe. They include a variety of organizations, both commercial and not-for profit, and include both startup companies building offerings around DOI and existing businesses who simply wish to add DOI as one tool in their service offerings.