The Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) assigned this DOI through DataCite, a leading global non-profit organization that provides DOIs for research data. DataCite now stores the associated metadata of WoRMS and – in the future - will disseminate this to other initiatives like the Data Citation Index (Thomson Reuters) who in their turn will link the dataset (WoRMS) to all publications citing it. Assigning a DOI to WoRMS also attests that it answers to certain quality standards and contains the necessary information to make it useable by other scientists.
 
A DOI is a unique, alphanumeric string to identify content and to provide a persistent link to the location of this content on the web. By assigning a DOI to WoRMS, it supports researchers by helping them in finding, identifying and citing WoRMS. The other way around, the DOI will help the Steering Committee of WoRMS to keep track of WoRMS citations in peer-reviewed literature.
 
A DOI for WoRMS adds value for the involved editors, by making their work citable and persistent.

WoRMS can now be cited as:
WoRMS Editorial Board (2016). World Register of Marine Species. Available from http://www.marinespecies.org at VLIZ. Accessed [YYYY-MM-DD]. doi:10.14284/170 

In the future, we will also assign DOIs to the monthly snapshots of the WoRMS data. This will enable people to refer to static versions of the data.