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The DOI System

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Re: The DOI System

#51

Post by afiori »

natch wrote: post #24
krab wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

> 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

Re: The DOI System

#52

Post by fsh »

natch wrote: post #24
krab wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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.

Re: The DOI System

#53

Post by zeckalpha »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #40
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…

DOIs are not URLs though. They are identifiers, as the name suggests. I don't think URLs were ever intended to be identifiers. At least that's not how they are used, as can be seen from the fact that there is a many-to-many relationship between URLs and pieces of content. Identifiers for published pieces that are independent from where that piece is currently published are useful. Just one example: An article can be…

URLs evolved into URNs and URIs

Re: The DOI System

#54

Post by zeckalpha »

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.

Re: The DOI System

#55

Post by uptime »

gwbilder wrote: post #13
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

Shout out to all the Crossref/Datacite people in this discussion. I use your services in polite mode for discovery and don’t know what I’d do without them. If any ORCID people are in the house you get some appreciation too.

I struggle to link articles to datasets but if the solution is out there it is probably based on your work.

Re: The DOI System

#56

Post by uptime »

afandian wrote: post #31
natch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but 10.1083 is still a shitty link compared to nature.com, independent of which url prefix is used.

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 o…

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!

Re: The DOI System

#57

Post by nickgros »

kergonath wrote: post #41
natch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume DOI is popular because people trust that the central entity might do a bit better job First, I don’t know how popular it is. Second, look at what an absolutely poor job the doi.org site themselves have done keeping their showcased example links from their demonstration document from breaking over the years. See my comment elsewhere here about what I found on archive.org. What am I missing here? It looks li…

> First, I don’t know how popular it is. Very. The doi is now the unique key to identify a scientific article. Researchers like it because it is an easy way to get canonical metadata without having to go through Google Scholar or (dog forbid) something clunky like Science Direct. You just put the doi and bang, you’ve got the article. No issue with a typo in the volume number, or authors who can go by different names…

Easily fetching the canonical metadata is so useful when doing a literature search and collecting sources, or trying to put together a bibliography. In Zotero (and presumably other bibliography managers), you can just plug the DOI in and you instantly have the title, authors, abstract, etc.

Re: The DOI System

#58

Post by natch »

fsh wrote: post #52
natch wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

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.

As is the second link, as many DOIs have.

Re: The DOI System

#59

Post by zoomablemind »

natch wrote: post #24
krab wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

>... 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.

Re: The DOI System

#60

Post by afandian »

uptime wrote: post #56
afandian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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 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/

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