3 ms·

How do a DOI help at all period? Once I click the link and the DOI redirects me then when I share I'm going to share the actual link not the DOI.

afandian 11y ago
A publisher should display the DOI on their landing page for the article, e.g. the top matter of http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137847 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... . If you want to share a persistent link, you can. In the context of scholarly articles, if you're reading an article, the references will be linked via DOI, e.g. here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137847#references http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... Where this all gets interesting is non-traditional scholarship, e.g. sharing on social media where there are lots of 'publishers' (twitter, reddit) and they don't particularly care about best practice from the scholarly publishing industry. How do you get someone to share the persistent link? You can't force them. It's not a solved problem, and probably never will be. Herbert Van de Sompel is working in this area http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/home/ http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/home/ with things like canonical link headers that indicate the canonical URL of a given page. Here's a presentation he did on the subject, which he calls 'signposting the scholarly web': https://www.force11.org/video/signposting-scholarly-web https://www.force11.org/video/signposting-scholarly-web
xioxox 11y ago
Because publishers often change their systems, so links can break. URLs can also be very long and difficult to include in text documents. Some journals I've published in have moved between several publishers. The DOI is an identifier which is resolved to point to the current location of the document. The DOI is an object, not a location of an object, as described here http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIIdentifierSpecs.html http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIIdentifierSpecs.html
- lsaferite 11y ago
  So... why not just use the 'DOI' as the canonical URI then? Is it just so they can try to extract some SEO magic juice from the URI?
  - afandian 11y ago
    That's the idea. We would like people to. We have about 5000 publisher members. Co-ordinating an entire industry can take time. As to why people don't... I wish I knew.
hvdsomp 11y ago
This is a very significant problem indeed. In our reference rot study (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253), we found that a very significant amount of papers were referenced by means of their landing page URL instead of by their DOI URL. As part of the "Signposting the Scholarly Web" work, we looked into this issue and thought that using a "canonical" link from the landing page URL to the DOI URL would be a good step. It needs to be understood that "canonical" was really introduced in the context of search engine optimization and is supported by web search engines. In essence, if a landing page would have a "canonical" link to the DOI RL, the content of the landing page would be indexed under the DOI URL. For browsers, the desired behavior would be to bookmark a page that has a "canonical" link under the canonical URL instead of the page's URL. At this time, to the best of my knowledge, this is not supported by browsers. However, it seems to me that it should not be impossible to achieve this, if, for example, the Persistent Identifier community (DOI, handle, PURL, ark, ...) would lobby for it. Alternatively, one could write an RFC and define another link relation type specifically for this relation type between landing page and persistent identifier. And lobby browser manufacturers to implement the "right" bookmarking behavior for it. But, the difference between "canonical" and this special-purpose relation type might be too subtle to make it through IANA registration scrutiny.

afandian 11y ago

A publisher should display the DOI on their landing page for the article, e.g. the top matter of http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137847 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... . If you want to share a persistent link, you can. In the context of scholarly articles, if you're reading an article, the references will be linked via DOI, e.g. here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137847#references http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... Where this all gets interesting is non-traditional scholarship, e.g. sharing on social media where there are lots of 'publishers' (twitter, reddit) and they don't particularly care about best practice from the scholarly publishing industry. How do you get someone to share the persistent link? You can't force them. It's not a solved problem, and probably never will be. Herbert Van de Sompel is working in this area http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/home/ http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/home/ with things like canonical link headers that indicate the canonical URL of a given page. Here's a presentation he did on the subject, which he calls 'signposting the scholarly web': https://www.force11.org/video/signposting-scholarly-web https://www.force11.org/video/signposting-scholarly-web

xioxox 11y ago

Because publishers often change their systems, so links can break. URLs can also be very long and difficult to include in text documents. Some journals I've published in have moved between several publishers. The DOI is an identifier which is resolved to point to the current location of the document. The DOI is an object, not a location of an object, as described here http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIIdentifierSpecs.html http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIIdentifierSpecs.html

lsaferite 11y ago
So... why not just use the 'DOI' as the canonical URI then? Is it just so they can try to extract some SEO magic juice from the URI?
- afandian 11y ago
  That's the idea. We would like people to. We have about 5000 publisher members. Co-ordinating an entire industry can take time. As to why people don't... I wish I knew.

hvdsomp 11y ago

This is a very significant problem indeed. In our reference rot study (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253), we found that a very significant amount of papers were referenced by means of their landing page URL instead of by their DOI URL. As part of the "Signposting the Scholarly Web" work, we looked into this issue and thought that using a "canonical" link from the landing page URL to the DOI URL would be a good step. It needs to be understood that "canonical" was really introduced in the context of search engine optimization and is supported by web search engines. In essence, if a landing page would have a "canonical" link to the DOI RL, the content of the landing page would be indexed under the DOI URL. For browsers, the desired behavior would be to bookmark a page that has a "canonical" link under the canonical URL instead of the page's URL. At this time, to the best of my knowledge, this is not supported by browsers. However, it seems to me that it should not be impossible to achieve this, if, for example, the Persistent Identifier community (DOI, handle, PURL, ark, ...) would lobby for it. Alternatively, one could write an RFC and define another link relation type specifically for this relation type between landing page and persistent identifier. And lobby browser manufacturers to implement the "right" bookmarking behavior for it. But, the difference between "canonical" and this special-purpose relation type might be too subtle to make it through IANA registration scrutiny.