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.
The DOI System
61–67 of 67 posts
Re: The DOI System
#62Since 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.
It depends what you're publishing, but if it's fully open access then you can post it at 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.
Re: The DOI System
#63Since 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.
It depends what you're publishing, but if it's fully open access then you can post it at 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 let…
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?
Re: The DOI System
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 pub…
The https link doesn't work for me, working link: http://www.scholix.org/
Re: The DOI System
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
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.
Re: The DOI System
#66On 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
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/ UnPaywall: https://unpaywall.org/
And Sci-Hub when I have too, but sometimes I just can't find the DOI on some articles.
Re: The DOI System
#67Can 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
What are these for exactly? I'm looking for a paper that doesn't have a DOI attached. Would there anyway to use these tools in a Windows environment to search for the DOI?