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Author here. You're not wrong. There's nothing magical about DOIs or everyone would use them for everything and there would be no link rot. You can only update

Author here. You're not wrong. There's nothing magical about DOIs or everyone would use them for everything and there would be no link rot. You can only update links if you know when and where things are moving, and you're still around to do it. Scholarly publishing is an area where documents need to stick around for a long time, be able to be cited in a well-understood way, etc etc. Crossref is an trade association of scholarly publishers, formed to solve exactly this problem. Part of the deal when a publisher joins Crossref is an obligation to keep the links up to date and a plan for what happens if the publisher suddenly vanishes into thin air. Initiatives like CLOCKSS address the archiving question http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home . The CLOCKSS homepage has a good overview. And to the 'tracking stuff down' point, the DOI is resolvable (i.e. a link you can click) but it's also an ID that you can look up in a database. DOIs predate the web and may live longer than it. Having a single, 'official' ID (whatever it looks like) is better than searching by metadata.

x3c 11y ago
Sorry, but what is DOI?
- afandian 11y ago
  As described in the blog post (although not fully). A DOI is a Digital Object Identifier. A digital object is something like a scholarly article. People need to be able to find it by URL, cite it, and refer to it with an ID. The URL is no good because it could change. If you cite a URL and it 404s in a few years time, that's link rot. So a DOI is a link that points to the item. It 'belongs' to the publisher who owns the article. They are obliged to update the link to point to the new location when it moves. Hence the DOI link always (in theory) works. From a user's perspective, a DOI is just a URL that you visit that redirects you to a different URL. From inside, it's a link resolver system backed by a database that publishers keep updated through a registration agency (e.g. Crossref). Different Registration Agencies do different things. Crossref has a tonne of metadata, contributed by publishers. Have a play here: http://api.crossref.org/works http://api.crossref.org/works There's a good Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier
cooper12 11y ago
> An obligation to keep the links up to date and a plan for what happens if the publisher suddenly vanishes into thin air. It's good to hear that scholars are getting together and trying to mitigate the volatility of URLs. I'll definitely need to read more on the subject to understand the pros and cons so thank you for your introduction in the article; many specialist blogs tend to only write for their specific audience. It seems like DOIs are an ample solution as long as they aren't a single point of failure.
- afandian 11y ago
  Crossref's been around for 15 years (and DOIs longer than that). The Crosstech blog has a lot of posts on the subject. You can start here http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers Here's a short list of posts that will give some background: http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids-without-stabbing-myself-in-the-eyeball.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids-without... http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi-outage-followup-report.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi-outag... http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and-persistently-identify-published-trustworthy-citable-online-scholarly-literature-right.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and... http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_some_conc.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_s...
IanCal 11y ago
> Having a single, 'official' ID (whatever it looks like) is better than searching by metadata. As someone who works with scholarly data, having IDs for things is absolutely invaluable. There's a lot you can do with DOIs quickly and easily that would be prohibitively difficult if you had to use human-added metadata.

x3c 11y ago

Sorry, but what is DOI?

afandian 11y ago
As described in the blog post (although not fully). A DOI is a Digital Object Identifier. A digital object is something like a scholarly article. People need to be able to find it by URL, cite it, and refer to it with an ID. The URL is no good because it could change. If you cite a URL and it 404s in a few years time, that's link rot. So a DOI is a link that points to the item. It 'belongs' to the publisher who owns the article. They are obliged to update the link to point to the new location when it moves. Hence the DOI link always (in theory) works. From a user's perspective, a DOI is just a URL that you visit that redirects you to a different URL. From inside, it's a link resolver system backed by a database that publishers keep updated through a registration agency (e.g. Crossref). Different Registration Agencies do different things. Crossref has a tonne of metadata, contributed by publishers. Have a play here: http://api.crossref.org/works http://api.crossref.org/works There's a good Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier

cooper12 11y ago

> An obligation to keep the links up to date and a plan for what happens if the publisher suddenly vanishes into thin air. It's good to hear that scholars are getting together and trying to mitigate the volatility of URLs. I'll definitely need to read more on the subject to understand the pros and cons so thank you for your introduction in the article; many specialist blogs tend to only write for their specific audience. It seems like DOIs are an ample solution as long as they aren't a single point of failure.

afandian 11y ago
Crossref's been around for 15 years (and DOIs longer than that). The Crosstech blog has a lot of posts on the subject. You can start here http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers Here's a short list of posts that will give some background: http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids-without-stabbing-myself-in-the-eyeball.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids-without... http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi-outage-followup-report.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi-outag... http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and-persistently-identify-published-trustworthy-citable-online-scholarly-literature-right.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and... http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_some_conc.html http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_s...

IanCal 11y ago

> Having a single, 'official' ID (whatever it looks like) is better than searching by metadata. As someone who works with scholarly data, having IDs for things is absolutely invaluable. There's a lot you can do with DOIs quickly and easily that would be prohibitively difficult if you had to use human-added metadata.