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Fundamentally, you are correct. In the current environment, most DOIs are issued by established journals, backed by relatively mature publishing software that
by verisimilidude 11y ago
Fundamentally, you are correct.
In the current environment, most DOIs are issued by established journals, backed by relatively mature publishing software that knows how to keep a DOI up-to-date. Therefore, empty DOIs are not much of a problem at the moment. Also for the moment, DOIs are far more reliable than URLs. URLs are terrible for citations, often going dead before an article is even published.
However, like you say, I could easily envision a future in which the current environment breaks down, new kinds of sites with less reliable software start issuing DOIs, DOIs go stale, DOIs don't adapt to changes in content models, etc. DOIs feel more like a band aid than a permanent solution.
Long-term, I like the idea of publishing articles on a system like IPFS, where the content determines the address via hash, that doesn't change, and any publishing system that needs to cite an article could hopefully just "pin" it for preservation. Perhaps you keep immutable copies of your article revisions in IPFS, and marry them together via a mutable IPNS interface for consumption. This would assume all articles are open access, maybe, but that wouldn't be a bad thing.
- x1798DE 11y agoDoes an IPFS system allow you traverse the revision tree? I think the ideal system would be one with a canonical identifier plus a content / version based identifier, so that if, for example, there is a retraction, you will know that by visiting the current version, but if you want to see the cited version, that is also available.
- verisimilidude 11y agoI'd love to see that. I think versioning is possible in IPFS via merkle tree, but I haven't taken the time to understand how it would be implemented. https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/merkledag https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/merkledag
- IanCal 11y agoThat's something that would be possible with IPNS (which allows a mutable 'pointer' to an IPFS hash, though this is just my lay understanding). This way your IPNS address becomes your DOI equivalent, but also providing the IPFS hash would give a static reference to exactly what it was you saw. There are some kinks here, as there isn't currently a way of verifying that the IPFS hash given was seen at the IPNS address. You also can't take an IPNS address and get all previous versions. It does sound like that's possible to add to IPNS, but is a future plan. It would be a step forwards from the current system though. A bit of info on IPNS, which is in really quite early stages afaik: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxdXBFca7D/example#/ipfs/QmQwAP9vFjbCtKvD8RkJdCvPHqLQjZfW7Mqbbqx18zd8j7/ipns/readme.md https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxd...
- icebraining 11y agoThere's already a site issuing "DOIs for Blogs" and other less conventional forms of content[1]. I'm not sure it's less reliable than established journals, though. [1] https://thewinnower.com/posts/archiving-and-aggregating-alternative-scholarly-content-dois-for-blogs https://thewinnower.com/posts/archiving-and-aggregating-alte...
- mwest 11y agoI see you can now even cite your Docker execution environment with a DOI: http://software.ac.uk/blog/2016-03-29-reproducible-research-citing-your-execution-environment-using-docker-and-doi http://software.ac.uk/blog/2016-03-29-reproducible-research-... :-)