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Rules against citing DOI-less content are easier to understand once you understand a bit more about life within an academic publishing house. An article with a

Rules against citing DOI-less content are easier to understand once you understand a bit more about life within an academic publishing house. An article with a DOI has more longevity. This is mentioned in the post, but I don't think the author fully grasps the importance of this. Plain URLs break down all the damn time; publishers/journals redesign their sites and migrate between technology partners often. It only takes a few Very Important People to flip out about a missing piece of data or a broken link before a publisher will start to put safeguards into the production workflow to prevent such complaints. Mandating DOIs alongside citations is an easy policy toward that goal. An article with a DOI will almost surely be supported by a technology back-end that can keep that DOI up-to-date, generate manifests for (C)LOCKSS, submit materials to archival services like Portico, etc. DOI-bound citations are much more efficient throughout the publishing process. Editors can use DOIs to quickly verify and proof citations. If a publisher's workflow requires sending papers to an XML composition vendor for tagging, DOIs can make that process more automated and accurate. Some of the more sophisticated XML vendors can generate all the citations given only the DOIs. This might not sounds like much, but it's notoriously easy to make mistakes on citations throughout the editorial process, even with NLP and other more enlightened software in the mix. If you ever see an article with a citation list like this... * Suzuki, et al. 2004... * Suzuki, et al. 2006a... * Suzuki, et al. 2006b... * Suzuki, et al. 2006d... * Suzuki, et al. 2006f... * Suzuki, et al. 2006g... * Suzuki, et al. 2007... * Suzuki, et al. 2008b... ...think about all the double/triple/quadruple checking bullshit that goes into making sure all the text and links in that list are accurate, and know that DOIs take most of that headache away. It's substantially more efficient at scale when DOIs are included. Recently I've been thinking about how some of these problems could potentially be solved via new ideas like IPFS. A Handle-based system like DOI might not be as necessary in IPFS (given IPNS), and perhaps you could start creating and citing more diverse sources of content with some confidence in preservation/longevity. It could be a great fit for open access content.

forgotpwtomain 11y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but IPFS intends to be torrent-like in terms of re-distribution - so you can no more guarantee that the article can be found there then with ordinary torrents, which I think is hardly more reliable then a url.
- verisimilidude 11y ago
  The difference is that anyone can "pin" any content in IPFS. So if an article cites any IPFS resource, it can also pin those resources regardless of whether or not they're academic, created by the same publisher, etc. IPFS would make it aggressively easy for any publisher to take responsibility for archiving wayward cited materials.
dalke 11y ago
I can understand why a publishing house would find the DOI to be useful. I can understand why a publishing house would want to encourage people to use a DOI. I do not understand why there are rules against citing DOI-less content, as that would seem to place the needs of the publishing house far above the needs for good scholarship. Elsewhere in this discussion I gave an example of a citation without a DOI from http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf : > Thomas E. Kurtz, letter to Secretary, X3, December 21, 1965, Calvin N. Mooers Papers (CBI 81), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, box 20, folder 1. That paper has dozens of DOI-less references, like meeting minutes and memos, which are stored in archives like the CBI or the Smithsonian. How does a paper like that get published in a journal which has rules against citing DOI-less content?
- verisimilidude 11y ago
  > I do not understand why there are rules against citing DOI-less content, as that would seem to place the needs of the publishing house far above the needs for good scholarship. Absolutely. Welcome to the industry! But the publisher's concerns are not without merit. Your cited reference is useless if nobody can find it in a couple years. I'd argue that any article which does not take steps to preserve the availability and connectivity of its sources is neglecting a critical component of "good scholarship", even though this often has nothing to do with the authors or research methodology. (There are, of course, countless justifiable exceptions to this.) There are creative solutions though. A good journal would take that PDF in your comment, get permission from the author, and package it up with the article as "supplementary data" or some other auxiliary material. A good publisher will find ways to otherwise publish critical outside materials. We are stuck at an awkward time in digital scholarship. In the old days, you could cite any published material because everything was on paper, and everything was distributed to a thousand libraries, and you could reasonably expect the availability of everything, and there was no expectation that everything would be available instantly. You can't put any of that confidence in naked web pages; URLs are fatally unreliable for this purpose. DOIs, and confidence in the tech brokers that use them, help. And with time, as more and different types of online content become more reliable, it will become easier to cite anything like the old days.

forgotpwtomain 11y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but IPFS intends to be torrent-like in terms of re-distribution - so you can no more guarantee that the article can be found there then with ordinary torrents, which I think is hardly more reliable then a url.

verisimilidude 11y ago
The difference is that anyone can "pin" any content in IPFS. So if an article cites any IPFS resource, it can also pin those resources regardless of whether or not they're academic, created by the same publisher, etc. IPFS would make it aggressively easy for any publisher to take responsibility for archiving wayward cited materials.

dalke 11y ago

I can understand why a publishing house would find the DOI to be useful. I can understand why a publishing house would want to encourage people to use a DOI. I do not understand why there are rules against citing DOI-less content, as that would seem to place the needs of the publishing house far above the needs for good scholarship. Elsewhere in this discussion I gave an example of a citation without a DOI from http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf : > Thomas E. Kurtz, letter to Secretary, X3, December 21, 1965, Calvin N. Mooers Papers (CBI 81), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, box 20, folder 1. That paper has dozens of DOI-less references, like meeting minutes and memos, which are stored in archives like the CBI or the Smithsonian. How does a paper like that get published in a journal which has rules against citing DOI-less content?

verisimilidude 11y ago
> I do not understand why there are rules against citing DOI-less content, as that would seem to place the needs of the publishing house far above the needs for good scholarship. Absolutely. Welcome to the industry! But the publisher's concerns are not without merit. Your cited reference is useless if nobody can find it in a couple years. I'd argue that any article which does not take steps to preserve the availability and connectivity of its sources is neglecting a critical component of "good scholarship", even though this often has nothing to do with the authors or research methodology. (There are, of course, countless justifiable exceptions to this.) There are creative solutions though. A good journal would take that PDF in your comment, get permission from the author, and package it up with the article as "supplementary data" or some other auxiliary material. A good publisher will find ways to otherwise publish critical outside materials. We are stuck at an awkward time in digital scholarship. In the old days, you could cite any published material because everything was on paper, and everything was distributed to a thousand libraries, and you could reasonably expect the availability of everything, and there was no expectation that everything would be available instantly. You can't put any of that confidence in naked web pages; URLs are fatally unreliable for this purpose. DOIs, and confidence in the tech brokers that use them, help. And with time, as more and different types of online content become more reliable, it will become easier to cite anything like the old days.