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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

by 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
  As is the second link, as many DOIs have.
zoomablemind 5y ago
>... Compare the readability and editability Indeed, I was wondering why not to adopt an approach similar to a Git repo where each leaf (document) is identified with a ref hash. It could be used with a publisher prefix to segment the hash-space. Basically, it's a repository of metadata. Each publisher could equally host the whole repo, but extend only their corresponding sub-repo. The central entity could then maintain the publisher's name-to-id convenience xref and some search facility.
afandian 5y ago
That’s why the display guidelines stipulate that DOIs are always expressed as URLs.
- natch 5y ago
  Sure, but 10.1083 is still a shitty link compared to nature.com, independent of which url prefix is used.
  - afandian 5y ago
    There are different timescales involved. The resolvability of a DOI is obviously important, and you have found a few examples where the steward of the content (ie publisher) hasn’t updated the links. But in that case DOIs can in theory be redirected to archived versions. That's the price you pay for a large, diverse community of publishers. Don't imagine that publishers would magically be any better at fixing their own websites. But more broadly, as identifiers, having an agreed scheme helps link publications, datasets, other entities such as funders and institutions. It allows discovery of metadata in a way that’s discoverable by all. Someone will want to follow those links in 100 years and whatever state DNS or WWW is in, the metadata will be in an open archive somewhere. (I'm at Crossref, AMA)
    - uptime 5y ago
      Taking you up on your AMA, is there a best practice for discovering datasets belonging to articles and vice-versa? I see that Web of Science has a lot of this but they don't make that linkage explicitly available as an export. I have tried querying isSupplementTo and chasing cited works, and I don't expect a smoking gun. Just now I tried searching Scholix via the web interface for IDs that are linked in Dryad, which is supposed to use the same linking system, and in either direction came up empty. TIA for any clues!
      - afandian 5y ago
        Scholix[0] is a collaboration between a few orgs, including Crossref (DOI registration agency for scholarly content, e.g. articles) and DataCite (DOI registration agency for data sets). If a DataCite member registers a data set, and mentions a link to a Crossref DOI, that's almost certainly a dataset-article link. Vice versa. So the data in Scholix is the union of "what citations do article publishers and dataset publishers think exist". We're working on improving how we process the data citation data, but ultimatley can't improve on what Publishers provide. Sorry, a bit of a non-answer. [0] https://www.scholix.org/ https://www.scholix.org/
        5y ago
krab 5y ago
Neither your URL nor your DOI resolves. I meant rather the correspondence of https://www.nature.com/articles/1771046b0 to 10.1038/1771046b0 or https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04114-w to 10.1038/s41586-021-04114-w
- afandian 5y ago
  Look at the metadata of those two articles. https://www.nature.com/articles/1771046b0 has <meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.1038/1771046b0"/> and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04114-w has <meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04114-w"/>
- natch 5y ago
  They aren’t meant to resolve, but to show the difference between friendly and unfriendly ways to construct a URL (or URI if you prefer). But yes that’s interesting and good to know that sometimes they can choose to use corresponding components in the URL versus DOI.
afiori 5y ago
> 10.1038/nature.com/2021/11/17/news/xxxxxxx can be a valid DOI, 10.1038 has the same role as the nature.com domain but with a different governance

by natch 5y ago

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
As is the second link, as many DOIs have.

zoomablemind 5y ago

>... Compare the readability and editability Indeed, I was wondering why not to adopt an approach similar to a Git repo where each leaf (document) is identified with a ref hash. It could be used with a publisher prefix to segment the hash-space. Basically, it's a repository of metadata. Each publisher could equally host the whole repo, but extend only their corresponding sub-repo. The central entity could then maintain the publisher's name-to-id convenience xref and some search facility.

afandian 5y ago

That’s why the display guidelines stipulate that DOIs are always expressed as URLs.

natch 5y ago
Sure, but 10.1083 is still a shitty link compared to nature.com, independent of which url prefix is used.
- afandian 5y ago
  There are different timescales involved. The resolvability of a DOI is obviously important, and you have found a few examples where the steward of the content (ie publisher) hasn’t updated the links. But in that case DOIs can in theory be redirected to archived versions. That's the price you pay for a large, diverse community of publishers. Don't imagine that publishers would magically be any better at fixing their own websites. But more broadly, as identifiers, having an agreed scheme helps link publications, datasets, other entities such as funders and institutions. It allows discovery of metadata in a way that’s discoverable by all. Someone will want to follow those links in 100 years and whatever state DNS or WWW is in, the metadata will be in an open archive somewhere. (I'm at Crossref, AMA)
  - uptime 5y ago
    Taking you up on your AMA, is there a best practice for discovering datasets belonging to articles and vice-versa? I see that Web of Science has a lot of this but they don't make that linkage explicitly available as an export. I have tried querying isSupplementTo and chasing cited works, and I don't expect a smoking gun. Just now I tried searching Scholix via the web interface for IDs that are linked in Dryad, which is supposed to use the same linking system, and in either direction came up empty. TIA for any clues!
    - afandian 5y ago
      Scholix[0] is a collaboration between a few orgs, including Crossref (DOI registration agency for scholarly content, e.g. articles) and DataCite (DOI registration agency for data sets). If a DataCite member registers a data set, and mentions a link to a Crossref DOI, that's almost certainly a dataset-article link. Vice versa. So the data in Scholix is the union of "what citations do article publishers and dataset publishers think exist". We're working on improving how we process the data citation data, but ultimatley can't improve on what Publishers provide. Sorry, a bit of a non-answer. [0] https://www.scholix.org/ https://www.scholix.org/
      - 5y ago

krab 5y ago

Neither your URL nor your DOI resolves. I meant rather the correspondence of https://www.nature.com/articles/1771046b0 to 10.1038/1771046b0 or https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04114-w to 10.1038/s41586-021-04114-w

afandian 5y ago
Look at the metadata of those two articles. https://www.nature.com/articles/1771046b0 has <meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.1038/1771046b0"/> and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04114-w has <meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04114-w"/>
natch 5y ago
They aren’t meant to resolve, but to show the difference between friendly and unfriendly ways to construct a URL (or URI if you prefer). But yes that’s interesting and good to know that sometimes they can choose to use corresponding components in the URL versus DOI.

afiori 5y ago

> 10.1038/nature.com/2021/11/17/news/xxxxxxx can be a valid DOI, 10.1038 has the same role as the nature.com domain but with a different governance