Quick Answer
Without a DOI, your articles rely on ordinary web URLs, which break or change when a site is redesigned or migrated, making citations unreliable over time. Journals without DOIs are also excluded from Crossref's citation-linking network, are harder to index in databases that expect DOI metadata, and can appear less credible to authors, reviewers, and indexing bodies who use DOI presence as a baseline quality signal.
1. Your Citations Become Fragile
A plain URL (e.g. yourjournal.com/articles/vol3/issue2/paper5) can break the moment you redesign your site, migrate to a new platform, or restructure your URL scheme. Every paper that ever cited that URL now points to a dead link. A DOI, by contrast, is a permanent identifier - it always resolves to the article's current location because you (or your registrar) update the target URL centrally, not on every citing document.
2. You're Excluded From Crossref's Citation Network
Crossref links citations between DOI-registered articles automatically - when Paper A (with a DOI) cites Paper B (with a DOI), that relationship is tracked and used to calculate citation counts. If your journal's articles have no DOI, they cannot participate in this network: your articles won't be linked as cited references, and citations you make to other DOI-registered work won't be fully traceable either.
3. Reduced Discoverability in Databases and Indexes
Many academic databases, aggregators, and discovery tools expect DOI metadata as part of their ingestion process. Some indexing and evaluation bodies use DOI coverage as one of several signals when assessing a journal. See Why Every Journal Needs a Crossref DOI for the full case, and Peer-Reviewed Journals for how DOI registration fits into broader quality signals.
4. Perceived Credibility
5. Harder Long-Term Archiving and Preservation
Because DOIs are backed by persistent metadata records, they make it easier for libraries, archives, and preservation services to track and verify your journal's output over time - something plain URLs don't support in a standardized way.