9 ms·

The DOI System

64 points by gone35 5y ago

gwbilder 5y ago
Discussions about problems with the DOI system and suggestions for potential replacements for it come up every few months. So a few years ago, I wrote something that helps outline some of the issues one would need to address: https://www.crossref.org/blog/rehashing-pids-without-stabbing-myself-in-the-eyeball/ https://www.crossref.org/blog/rehashing-pids-without-stabbin...
koeng 5y ago
IPFS (and other technologies like it) are essentially just distributed DOIs, which are extremely functional and have been used for years, yet get very little appreciation in tech field.
- detaro 5y ago
  The "just distributed" is the interesting bit though. DOIs are really the same as URLs, except the lookup doesn't use DNS.
  - jiggunjer 5y ago
    I think DOI is essentially a URI schema. I don't think there is a technical reason preventing them from being distributed like IPFS, in fact the underlying resources are distributed it's just the URL lookup that is centralized.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      Yes, it is a URI schema. FAQ #11, at https://www.doi.org/faq.html https://www.doi.org/faq.html > DOI & URI: how does the DOI system work with web URI technologies? > DOI names may be expressed as URLs (URIs) through a HTTP proxy server. In addition, DOI is a registered URI within the info-URI namespace (IETF RFC 4452, the "info" URI Scheme for Information Assets with Identifiers in Public Namespaces). See the DOI Handbook, 2 Numbering and 3 Resolution, for more information. I know little about IPFS. I know a bit more about DOIs. A DOI maps more to an abstract, mutable resource than a specific document or file. That doesn't seem so easy to express in IPFS. Take doi:10.1093/nar/gkz173 which I picked arbitrarily. This resolves to https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/47/11/e63/5377471 https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/47/11/e63/5377471 . That shows the content of the paper in HTML, with an option to download in PDF. It also has references to the journal issue, methods to get the citation in various format, a navigation bar for the site, and branding for the journal. Many of these may change over time. Indeed, the paper itself may change if there are any updates or corrections, without changing the DOI. Or the paper might be retracted, like doi:10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 which resolves to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 . The original paper is no longer accessible. (An alternative is to add the equivalent of a big red stamp on it saying "RETRACTED" while leaving the content accessible.) Finally, I suspect many journals would not accept a scheme which prevents them from charging for access. Could you explain how IPFS might handle these issues of multiple formats, mutability, and payment?
      - drdeca 5y ago
        Well, you could still use the multi-hash thing for the identifiers without distributing them on IPFS, though it would make it much more convenient for people to pirate them, because then people wouldn’t have to look up “what is the multihash for the thing with this doi?” before requesting it on ipfs.
      - teorema 5y ago
        re: mutability you just have the standard be that the document being linked to is a sort of wrapper to the actual one. My guess is this is really what's going on with doi anyway. But you're correct that the mutability issue is sort of a tricky one. There's this from IPFS about mutability: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/file-systems/#mutable-file-system-mfs https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/file-systems/#mutable-file-sys...
      - jamessb 5y ago
        > The original paper is no longer accessible. (An alternative is to add the equivalent of a big red stamp on it saying "RETRACTED" while leaving the content accessible.) I think you are slightly confused - the "alternative" that you describe is actually what happened in this case (and in all the cases of retracted papers that I've encountered). A Retraction Notice has been published at a separate publication [1] with its own DOI, and it cites the original paper [2]. The original paper [2] has been updated to indicate that it has been retracted. In the HTML version, there is an orange banner saying "This article has been retracted". In the PDF version [3] there is a red header, and the retraction notice has been appended as an extra page. But you are correct that it is important to be able to update PDFs if a significant mistake (or deliberate fraud) is identified. [1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 [2]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064 [3]: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064 https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064
        eesmith 5y ago
        Indeed. I misread the retraction notice quite severely. Thank you for the correction. As an alternative example, I searched Retraction Watch. https://retractionwatch.com/2021/09/23/alzheimers-diagnosis-paper-retracted-for-failure-to-disclose-conflicts-of-interest-other-issues/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/09/23/alzheimers-diagnosis-... describes the paper: > “Intracranial pressure waveform changes in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment” — which now seems to have disappeared entirely from the journal’s site — appeared in Surgical Neurology International in July. It points out the paper is still in PubMed Central, at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8168790/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8168790/ . However, its DOI, 10.25259/SNI_48_2021 , redirects to a 404 page from the journal.
yawnxyz 5y ago
Huh I forgot that DOIs are meant for more than just academic journals. Do DOIs still make sense if we have web3? Would the future of DOIs be similar to a filecoin kind of system, instead of using resolvers and organizations like CrossRef?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kamray23 5y ago
  Still not sure if we'll have web3. It kind of seems like a great way to suddenly make 50% of web infrastructure carry nothing but transaction data from node to node, and when you think about it with private data storage it makes laws like the GDPR unenforceable so there might be considerable state backlash. Well, we'll see how it develops. A more important concern is whether we need DOIs with the current W3C standards for Semantic Web. We already have a multitude of absolutely giant databases such as Wikidata, but also many others linking together semantic information from all over the web into a giant machine and human readable network: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q686797 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q686797. Do you really need an incomprehensible centralized system such as DOIs when you have a multitude of separate incomprehensible IDs linked together by human readable semantics?
jiggunjer 5y ago
I believe the one big issue with DOIs is they rely on the resource owners to update the centralized database if the resource location changes. So links can still break/rot despite knowing the URN. Another issue is that it doesn't guarantee the URN (i.e. DOI number) uniquely identifies a resource. So a single resource can have several aliases, potentially confusing discussions or bypassing blacklists, etc.
hlandau 5y ago
Can someone tell me where to get a definitive list of DOI prefixes? I tried to find this some time ago and came away very frustrated. The system seems in reality very opaque.
- cordmata 5y ago
  haha, yeah, keep peeling the onion https://handle.net/ https://handle.net/
  - natch 5y ago
    Don’t know why you are downvoted, this site has always popped up as one of the big stakeholders in the weird DOI schemes.
    - afandian 5y ago
      This is the equivalent to tracing a domain registrar up to ICANN.
      - natch 5y ago
        Yes, which is a significant connection to make when understanding the big picture here.
- murphyslab 5y ago
  Worth reading the Wikipedia article on the Handle System, of which the DOI system is a subset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handle_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handle_System All handles that start with 10 are DOIs. Handles that start with 20 are issued by CNRI. I don't know of a published list of prefixes, but it would be easy to investigate since entering the prefix into the appropriate resolver will bring up information on the issuing authority: - https://hdl.handle.net/20.1000 https://hdl.handle.net/20.1000 : "Prefix for CNRI licenses." - https://doi.org/10.14288 https://doi.org/10.14288 : "Datacite prefix 8/22/13" Not all have the DESC field, but you can figure out who these are from other fields: - https://doi.org/10.14288 https://doi.org/10.14288 : CrossRef & American Chem. Soc. publications - https://doi.org/10.1038 https://doi.org/10.1038 : CrossRef & Nature publications etc...
Vinnl 5y ago
On the odd chance that someone needs a JS library to detect whether a webpage exposes a DOI that identifies it (eg for a browser extension for academics), I wrote one that might be useful: https://www.npmjs.com/package/get-dois https://www.npmjs.com/package/get-dois
- pogue 5y ago
  That would be super helpful when I find a journal article that's on Pubmed, but doesn't have a DOI attached to it anywhere that I can find. Anyone wanna take on this project? I already use: Open Access Button: https://openaccessbutton.org/ https://openaccessbutton.org/ UnPaywall: https://unpaywall.org/ https://unpaywall.org/ And Sci-Hub when I have too, but sometimes I just can't find the DOI on some articles.
natch 5y ago
I’ve never understood this as anything other than an oddly secretive power and money grab by some entrenched stakeholders in publishing and document delivery. They seem to have non-guessable, non-hierarchy-revealing URLs that must be resolved using a database they control. It strikes me as a showcase of ways to try to get around web standards to make things locked down. Last time I looked at this (with horror, not with interest), the fees to become a member or to register links were exorbitant and the system itself seemed to be geared around supporting payment and DRM scenarios while making promises to fix non-existing problems (or ones that could be fixed for free using well known standard web practices).
- krab 5y ago
  > non-hierarchy-revealing URLs that must be resolved using a database they control What do you mean? There is a journal prefix (Nature has 10.1038) and the link usually translates fairly directly to a URL for new articles. EDIT: Just looked it up in the DOI rules. The registrant chooses the suffix. So the journals are free to maintain 1:1 mapping to URLs if they wish. I assume DOI is popular because people trust that the central entity might do a bit better job with regards to link rot than the journals themselves.
  - natch 5y ago
    Compare the readability and editability of: nature.com/2021/11/17/news/ versus: 10.1038.123.366.345643 And you ask what I mean. What I mean is the first one is transparently better in several ways. If I got the syntax wrong, just focus on the first part then, nature.com versus 10.1083. One is more readable than the other.
    - fsh 5y ago
      The sole purpose of DOIs is that they never change. The moment Nature decides to update their CMS, the first link is going to 404.
      - natch 5y ago
cblconfederate 5y ago
unbelievable that this has not been superceded after so many years
natch 5y ago
Visit their old demo pages from early on (5 years into their existence though, after they had time to work out the kinks) where they had examples of DOI links that supposedly will never break: https://web.archive.org/web/20050305141724/http://www.doi.org/demos.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050305141724/http://www.doi.or... Don’t just follow the links as they are on archive.org, because that wraps the links and you get an almost comical series of ultimately unsuccessful redirects (unlike many redirects on archive.org which often ARE successful when not using DOI links). No, try the DOI links themselves by copy pasting them without the archive.org wrapper. I think you’ll find many of them (most of them?) are not working. This version of the page is from after “the handle system” had been up and rolling for a few years. To be fair, maybe some browser plug-in is needed? Notice also how thickly the web site is festooned with copyright, trademark, and registered trademark notices and the like. Feels off to me.
- eesmith 5y ago
  > examples of DOI links that supposedly will never break I looked in the FAQ and related materials from that 2005 mirror, and didn't see where they said the links would never break. Did they promise to archive every resolvable DOI in case a registration agency should go out of business or stop being a registration agency? FWIW, here's what I found: doi:10.1038/35057062 - works doi:10.1002/0470841559.ch1 - works doi:10.1228/0103000001002 - does not work. Neither DDG nor Google Scholar know of the whitepaper "Secure Internet Delivery of High Value Content". The source organization, "Lon Inc." does not seem to exist, or at least, http://loninc.com/ http://loninc.com/ does not resolve. doi:10.1228/0103000001009 - does not resolve. Also from "Lon Inc." doi:10.1430/8105 - resolves to https://www.medra.org/servlet/MREngine?hdl=10.1430/8105 https://www.medra.org/servlet/MREngine?hdl=10.1430/8105 resolving in turn to https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1430/8105 https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1430/8105 . doi:10.1392/BC1.0 - works doi:10.1786/SIBQK6AD8RNA - does not work. The corresponding document appears to be https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/4/section/4 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/4/section/4 , with no associated doi. The other four DOIs from The Stationery Office UK Official Publications Catalog also do not resolve. While I can find the press release notice when TSO applied DOIs to UKOP (at http://www.doi.org/news/TSO-UKOPPressRelease.pdf http://www.doi.org/news/TSO-UKOPPressRelease.pdf ), I cannot find why they decided to no longer use or support DOIs. It looks like one registration agency went out of business and another stopped supporting DOIs. What should DOI have done to improve things to your satisfaction? Sci-Hub works well with DOIs, and without festooned notices and the like. ;)
aaron695 5y ago
DOI's allow Sci-Hub to function pretty well. One good example of how they have found a purpose to serve no one else was doing. DOI's also apply to datasets ie. - https://www.ands.org.au/guides/doi https://www.ands.org.au/guides/doi DOI's can theoretically apply to paragraphs, sentences, words. Each having a different DOI. There's a lot to them. The in practice case for DOI's seems to be like a approximate hash function for things, with the location included. From memory retracted articles will have the same DOI, even though it will be different since it'll say it's retracted.
thom 5y ago
Better known as “those things you paste into Sci-Hub”.
nabla9 5y ago
DOI is one implementation of handle system defined in RFCs 3650, 3651 and 3652. "RFC 3650: Handle System Overview" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3650.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3650.txt "RFC 3651: Handle System Namespace and Service Definition" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3651.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3651.txt "RFC 3652: Handle System Protocol (ver 2.1) Specification" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3652.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3652.txt Digital Object Architecture and the Handle System - icann https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-002-14oct19-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-002-14oct19... >The Digital Object Architecture (DOA) is an overall architecture for managing digital objects with an associated unique persistent identifier. In this context, digital objects are defined as a sequence or set of sequences of bits. The DOA resulted from the work by Dr. Robert Kahn and Dr. Vinton Cerf at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in the late 1980s. >The DOA has three core components: the identifier/resolution system, the Digital Object Repository system, and the Digital Object Registry system containing metadata about the repository objects. The Handle System is the original name of the identifier/resolution system of the DOA. Its governance is coordinated by the DONA Foundation, a Geneva-incorporated nonprofit organization founded by CNRI. >The Handle System and the DONA Foundation are the elements of the DOA that are closest to ICANN organization’s role helping coordinate the Internet's system of unique identifiers. This report will focus on those two elements to better understand the technology and its usage, innovation, and limitations. This report is not intended to endorse the technology nor offer any recommendations regarding its operation. It is based on the set of publicly available technical documents, an analysis of the code published on CNRI website, and a number of interviews with Dr. Robert Kahn and his team at CNRI. https://www.handle.net/ https://www.handle.net/
zeckalpha 5y ago
Dare I say it… this domain seems like a good use of blockchain. Content won’t go away, references can be baked into the graph, makes preregistration explicit, edits would be transparent.
19690401 5y ago
Since we're on this topic, anybody knows a way to get (very) cheap DOIs? I know people who try to maintain independent repositories of academic papers, and are successful at it, but don't have the budget to get standardly-priced DOIs for all those articles - one of the few complaints their users have.
- austinjp 5y ago
  It depends what you're publishing, but if it's fully open access then you can post it at https://osf.io https://osf.io and get a free DOI almost immediately. Obviously it's "their" DOI. If you want your own prefix, then you need to register as a DOI issuer (or whatever the correct term is) which I presume is the cost you mention. To me it seems similar to certificate authorities. There are several DOI issuers who act a bit like letsencrypt, doing their best to make an opaque process easier to navigate. But it simply takes a fair bit of cash to become an issuer. Maybe there's space here for a different approach, but DOI and Handle are the incumbents and the "market" is resistant to change. Have a read through the posts at the Crossref website, including the minutes from their meetings. There's plenty written on HN too about the likes of Elsevier and their monopolization of academic publishing.
  - 19690401 5y ago
    Thanks! Wrt "There are several DOI issuers who act a bit like letsencrypt" -- I haven't seen any that are free like letsencrypt, did you have in mind any concrete issuer?

64 points by gone35 5y ago

Discussions about problems with the DOI system and suggestions for potential replacements for it come up every few months. So a few years ago, I wrote something that helps outline some of the issues one would need to address: https://www.crossref.org/blog/rehashing-pids-without-stabbing-myself-in-the-eyeball/ https://www.crossref.org/blog/rehashing-pids-without-stabbin...

koeng 5y ago

IPFS (and other technologies like it) are essentially just distributed DOIs, which are extremely functional and have been used for years, yet get very little appreciation in tech field.

detaro 5y ago
The "just distributed" is the interesting bit though. DOIs are really the same as URLs, except the lookup doesn't use DNS.
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  I think DOI is essentially a URI schema. I don't think there is a technical reason preventing them from being distributed like IPFS, in fact the underlying resources are distributed it's just the URL lookup that is centralized.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    Yes, it is a URI schema. FAQ #11, at https://www.doi.org/faq.html https://www.doi.org/faq.html > DOI & URI: how does the DOI system work with web URI technologies? > DOI names may be expressed as URLs (URIs) through a HTTP proxy server. In addition, DOI is a registered URI within the info-URI namespace (IETF RFC 4452, the "info" URI Scheme for Information Assets with Identifiers in Public Namespaces). See the DOI Handbook, 2 Numbering and 3 Resolution, for more information. I know little about IPFS. I know a bit more about DOIs. A DOI maps more to an abstract, mutable resource than a specific document or file. That doesn't seem so easy to express in IPFS. Take doi:10.1093/nar/gkz173 which I picked arbitrarily. This resolves to https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/47/11/e63/5377471 https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/47/11/e63/5377471 . That shows the content of the paper in HTML, with an option to download in PDF. It also has references to the journal issue, methods to get the citation in various format, a navigation bar for the site, and branding for the journal. Many of these may change over time. Indeed, the paper itself may change if there are any updates or corrections, without changing the DOI. Or the paper might be retracted, like doi:10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 which resolves to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 . The original paper is no longer accessible. (An alternative is to add the equivalent of a big red stamp on it saying "RETRACTED" while leaving the content accessible.) Finally, I suspect many journals would not accept a scheme which prevents them from charging for access. Could you explain how IPFS might handle these issues of multiple formats, mutability, and payment?
    - drdeca 5y ago
      Well, you could still use the multi-hash thing for the identifiers without distributing them on IPFS, though it would make it much more convenient for people to pirate them, because then people wouldn’t have to look up “what is the multihash for the thing with this doi?” before requesting it on ipfs.
    - teorema 5y ago
      re: mutability you just have the standard be that the document being linked to is a sort of wrapper to the actual one. My guess is this is really what's going on with doi anyway. But you're correct that the mutability issue is sort of a tricky one. There's this from IPFS about mutability: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/file-systems/#mutable-file-system-mfs https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/file-systems/#mutable-file-sys...
    - jamessb 5y ago
      > The original paper is no longer accessible. (An alternative is to add the equivalent of a big red stamp on it saying "RETRACTED" while leaving the content accessible.) I think you are slightly confused - the "alternative" that you describe is actually what happened in this case (and in all the cases of retracted papers that I've encountered). A Retraction Notice has been published at a separate publication [1] with its own DOI, and it cites the original paper [2]. The original paper [2] has been updated to indicate that it has been retracted. In the HTML version, there is an orange banner saying "This article has been retracted". In the PDF version [3] there is a red header, and the retraction notice has been appended as an extra page. But you are correct that it is important to be able to update PDFs if a significant mistake (or deliberate fraud) is identified. [1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abn0168 [2]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064 [3]: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064 https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/scisignal.aag1064
      - eesmith 5y ago
        Indeed. I misread the retraction notice quite severely. Thank you for the correction. As an alternative example, I searched Retraction Watch. https://retractionwatch.com/2021/09/23/alzheimers-diagnosis-paper-retracted-for-failure-to-disclose-conflicts-of-interest-other-issues/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/09/23/alzheimers-diagnosis-... describes the paper: > “Intracranial pressure waveform changes in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment” — which now seems to have disappeared entirely from the journal’s site — appeared in Surgical Neurology International in July. It points out the paper is still in PubMed Central, at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8168790/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8168790/ . However, its DOI, 10.25259/SNI_48_2021 , redirects to a 404 page from the journal.

yawnxyz 5y ago

Huh I forgot that DOIs are meant for more than just academic journals. Do DOIs still make sense if we have web3? Would the future of DOIs be similar to a filecoin kind of system, instead of using resolvers and organizations like CrossRef?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kamray23 5y ago
Still not sure if we'll have web3. It kind of seems like a great way to suddenly make 50% of web infrastructure carry nothing but transaction data from node to node, and when you think about it with private data storage it makes laws like the GDPR unenforceable so there might be considerable state backlash. Well, we'll see how it develops. A more important concern is whether we need DOIs with the current W3C standards for Semantic Web. We already have a multitude of absolutely giant databases such as Wikidata, but also many others linking together semantic information from all over the web into a giant machine and human readable network: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q686797 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q686797. Do you really need an incomprehensible centralized system such as DOIs when you have a multitude of separate incomprehensible IDs linked together by human readable semantics?

jiggunjer 5y ago

I believe the one big issue with DOIs is they rely on the resource owners to update the centralized database if the resource location changes. So links can still break/rot despite knowing the URN. Another issue is that it doesn't guarantee the URN (i.e. DOI number) uniquely identifies a resource. So a single resource can have several aliases, potentially confusing discussions or bypassing blacklists, etc.

hlandau 5y ago

Can someone tell me where to get a definitive list of DOI prefixes? I tried to find this some time ago and came away very frustrated. The system seems in reality very opaque.

cordmata 5y ago
haha, yeah, keep peeling the onion https://handle.net/ https://handle.net/
- natch 5y ago
  Don’t know why you are downvoted, this site has always popped up as one of the big stakeholders in the weird DOI schemes.
  - afandian 5y ago
    This is the equivalent to tracing a domain registrar up to ICANN.
    - natch 5y ago
      Yes, which is a significant connection to make when understanding the big picture here.
murphyslab 5y ago
Worth reading the Wikipedia article on the Handle System, of which the DOI system is a subset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handle_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handle_System All handles that start with 10 are DOIs. Handles that start with 20 are issued by CNRI. I don't know of a published list of prefixes, but it would be easy to investigate since entering the prefix into the appropriate resolver will bring up information on the issuing authority: - https://hdl.handle.net/20.1000 https://hdl.handle.net/20.1000 : "Prefix for CNRI licenses." - https://doi.org/10.14288 https://doi.org/10.14288 : "Datacite prefix 8/22/13" Not all have the DESC field, but you can figure out who these are from other fields: - https://doi.org/10.14288 https://doi.org/10.14288 : CrossRef & American Chem. Soc. publications - https://doi.org/10.1038 https://doi.org/10.1038 : CrossRef & Nature publications etc...

Vinnl 5y ago

On the odd chance that someone needs a JS library to detect whether a webpage exposes a DOI that identifies it (eg for a browser extension for academics), I wrote one that might be useful: https://www.npmjs.com/package/get-dois https://www.npmjs.com/package/get-dois

pogue 5y ago
That would be super helpful when I find a journal article that's on Pubmed, but doesn't have a DOI attached to it anywhere that I can find. Anyone wanna take on this project? I already use: Open Access Button: https://openaccessbutton.org/ https://openaccessbutton.org/ UnPaywall: https://unpaywall.org/ https://unpaywall.org/ And Sci-Hub when I have too, but sometimes I just can't find the DOI on some articles.

natch 5y ago

I’ve never understood this as anything other than an oddly secretive power and money grab by some entrenched stakeholders in publishing and document delivery. They seem to have non-guessable, non-hierarchy-revealing URLs that must be resolved using a database they control. It strikes me as a showcase of ways to try to get around web standards to make things locked down. Last time I looked at this (with horror, not with interest), the fees to become a member or to register links were exorbitant and the system itself seemed to be geared around supporting payment and DRM scenarios while making promises to fix non-existing problems (or ones that could be fixed for free using well known standard web practices).

krab 5y ago
> non-hierarchy-revealing URLs that must be resolved using a database they control What do you mean? There is a journal prefix (Nature has 10.1038) and the link usually translates fairly directly to a URL for new articles. EDIT: Just looked it up in the DOI rules. The registrant chooses the suffix. So the journals are free to maintain 1:1 mapping to URLs if they wish. I assume DOI is popular because people trust that the central entity might do a bit better job with regards to link rot than the journals themselves.
- natch 5y ago
  Compare the readability and editability of: nature.com/2021/11/17/news/ versus: 10.1038.123.366.345643 And you ask what I mean. What I mean is the first one is transparently better in several ways. If I got the syntax wrong, just focus on the first part then, nature.com versus 10.1083. One is more readable than the other.
  - fsh 5y ago
    The sole purpose of DOIs is that they never change. The moment Nature decides to update their CMS, the first link is going to 404.
    - natch 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago

unbelievable that this has not been superceded after so many years

natch 5y ago

Visit their old demo pages from early on (5 years into their existence though, after they had time to work out the kinks) where they had examples of DOI links that supposedly will never break: https://web.archive.org/web/20050305141724/http://www.doi.org/demos.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050305141724/http://www.doi.or... Don’t just follow the links as they are on archive.org, because that wraps the links and you get an almost comical series of ultimately unsuccessful redirects (unlike many redirects on archive.org which often ARE successful when not using DOI links). No, try the DOI links themselves by copy pasting them without the archive.org wrapper. I think you’ll find many of them (most of them?) are not working. This version of the page is from after “the handle system” had been up and rolling for a few years. To be fair, maybe some browser plug-in is needed? Notice also how thickly the web site is festooned with copyright, trademark, and registered trademark notices and the like. Feels off to me.

eesmith 5y ago
> examples of DOI links that supposedly will never break I looked in the FAQ and related materials from that 2005 mirror, and didn't see where they said the links would never break. Did they promise to archive every resolvable DOI in case a registration agency should go out of business or stop being a registration agency? FWIW, here's what I found: doi:10.1038/35057062 - works doi:10.1002/0470841559.ch1 - works doi:10.1228/0103000001002 - does not work. Neither DDG nor Google Scholar know of the whitepaper "Secure Internet Delivery of High Value Content". The source organization, "Lon Inc." does not seem to exist, or at least, http://loninc.com/ http://loninc.com/ does not resolve. doi:10.1228/0103000001009 - does not resolve. Also from "Lon Inc." doi:10.1430/8105 - resolves to https://www.medra.org/servlet/MREngine?hdl=10.1430/8105 https://www.medra.org/servlet/MREngine?hdl=10.1430/8105 resolving in turn to https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1430/8105 https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1430/8105 . doi:10.1392/BC1.0 - works doi:10.1786/SIBQK6AD8RNA - does not work. The corresponding document appears to be https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/4/section/4 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/4/section/4 , with no associated doi. The other four DOIs from The Stationery Office UK Official Publications Catalog also do not resolve. While I can find the press release notice when TSO applied DOIs to UKOP (at http://www.doi.org/news/TSO-UKOPPressRelease.pdf http://www.doi.org/news/TSO-UKOPPressRelease.pdf ), I cannot find why they decided to no longer use or support DOIs. It looks like one registration agency went out of business and another stopped supporting DOIs. What should DOI have done to improve things to your satisfaction? Sci-Hub works well with DOIs, and without festooned notices and the like. ;)

aaron695 5y ago

DOI's allow Sci-Hub to function pretty well. One good example of how they have found a purpose to serve no one else was doing. DOI's also apply to datasets ie. - https://www.ands.org.au/guides/doi https://www.ands.org.au/guides/doi DOI's can theoretically apply to paragraphs, sentences, words. Each having a different DOI. There's a lot to them. The in practice case for DOI's seems to be like a approximate hash function for things, with the location included. From memory retracted articles will have the same DOI, even though it will be different since it'll say it's retracted.

thom 5y ago

Better known as “those things you paste into Sci-Hub”.

nabla9 5y ago

DOI is one implementation of handle system defined in RFCs 3650, 3651 and 3652. "RFC 3650: Handle System Overview" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3650.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3650.txt "RFC 3651: Handle System Namespace and Service Definition" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3651.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3651.txt "RFC 3652: Handle System Protocol (ver 2.1) Specification" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3652.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3652.txt Digital Object Architecture and the Handle System - icann https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-002-14oct19-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-002-14oct19... >The Digital Object Architecture (DOA) is an overall architecture for managing digital objects with an associated unique persistent identifier. In this context, digital objects are defined as a sequence or set of sequences of bits. The DOA resulted from the work by Dr. Robert Kahn and Dr. Vinton Cerf at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in the late 1980s. >The DOA has three core components: the identifier/resolution system, the Digital Object Repository system, and the Digital Object Registry system containing metadata about the repository objects. The Handle System is the original name of the identifier/resolution system of the DOA. Its governance is coordinated by the DONA Foundation, a Geneva-incorporated nonprofit organization founded by CNRI. >The Handle System and the DONA Foundation are the elements of the DOA that are closest to ICANN organization’s role helping coordinate the Internet's system of unique identifiers. This report will focus on those two elements to better understand the technology and its usage, innovation, and limitations. This report is not intended to endorse the technology nor offer any recommendations regarding its operation. It is based on the set of publicly available technical documents, an analysis of the code published on CNRI website, and a number of interviews with Dr. Robert Kahn and his team at CNRI. https://www.handle.net/ https://www.handle.net/

zeckalpha 5y ago

Dare I say it… this domain seems like a good use of blockchain. Content won’t go away, references can be baked into the graph, makes preregistration explicit, edits would be transparent.

19690401 5y ago

Since we're on this topic, anybody knows a way to get (very) cheap DOIs? I know people who try to maintain independent repositories of academic papers, and are successful at it, but don't have the budget to get standardly-priced DOIs for all those articles - one of the few complaints their users have.

austinjp 5y ago
It depends what you're publishing, but if it's fully open access then you can post it at https://osf.io https://osf.io and get a free DOI almost immediately. Obviously it's "their" DOI. If you want your own prefix, then you need to register as a DOI issuer (or whatever the correct term is) which I presume is the cost you mention. To me it seems similar to certificate authorities. There are several DOI issuers who act a bit like letsencrypt, doing their best to make an opaque process easier to navigate. But it simply takes a fair bit of cash to become an issuer. Maybe there's space here for a different approach, but DOI and Handle are the incumbents and the "market" is resistant to change. Have a read through the posts at the Crossref website, including the minutes from their meetings. There's plenty written on HN too about the likes of Elsevier and their monopolization of academic publishing.
- 19690401 5y ago
  Thanks! Wrt "There are several DOI issuers who act a bit like letsencrypt" -- I haven't seen any that are free like letsencrypt, did you have in mind any concrete issuer?