The DOI System • Hacker News Board

Re: The DOI System

#11

Post by gwbilder » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 6:32 AM UTC

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-stabbin...

Re: The DOI System

#12

Post by murphyslab » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

hlandau wrote: post #9

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.

Worth reading the Wikipedia article on the Handle System, of which the DOI system is a subset:

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 : "Prefix for CNRI licenses."

- 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 : CrossRef & American Chem. Soc. publications

- https://doi.org/10.1038 : CrossRef & Nature publications

etc...

Re: The DOI System

#13

Post by gwbilder » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 6:43 AM UTC

hlandau wrote: post #9

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.

DOI prefixes are designed to be opaque. All they do is serve as a namespace that helps guarantee that somebody can generate a unique DOI (yes, I know, other approaches to this would arguably be better). In short- the prefix doesn't really tell you anything useful about the DOI. So what are you trying to do?

And have you looked at the Crossref and/or DataCite APIs?

https://api.crossref.org https://api.datacite.org

Re: The DOI System

#14

Post by drdeca » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 7:11 AM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #8

jiggunjer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it is a URI schema. FAQ #11, at 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 Reso…

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.

Re: The DOI System

#15

Post by Vinnl » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 7:23 AM UTC

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

Re: The DOI System

#16

Post by natch » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 7:47 AM UTC

cordmata wrote: post #10

hlandau wrote: post #9

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.

haha, yeah, keep peeling the onion https://handle.net/

Don’t know why you are downvoted, this site has always popped up as one of the big stakeholders in the weird DOI schemes.

Re: The DOI System

#17

Post by natch » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

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).

Re: The DOI System

#18

Post by kamray23 » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

yawnxyz wrote: post #3

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?

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. 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?

Re: The DOI System

#19

Post by cblconfederate » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 8:15 AM UTC

unbelievable that this has not been superceded after so many years

Re: The DOI System

#20

Post by krab » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 8:17 AM UTC

natch wrote: post #17

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 wi…

> 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.