Re: DOI

From: Mark Doyle <doyle_at_APS.ORG>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 14:12:13 -0500

Greetings,

On Friday, February 16, 2001, at 04:38 AM, Leslie Chan wrote:

> However, for scholarly or scientific publishers who wish to have their
> publications easily searchable, interoperable and interlinkable with
> other publications, DOI is neither sufficient nor necessary.

This is correct. See for instance

http://www.catchword.com/cgi-bin/cgi?ini=alpsp&body=linker&reqidx=/catchword/alpsp/09531513/v13n1/s2/p5

(article I wrote in Learned Publishing - 13(1) page 5, Jan.
2000)). The key point of the article is that giving a
peer-review label such as "Phys. Rev. Lett. 86 1 (2001)" to
an article gives a persistent name that can easily be mapped
to persistent URLs.

> My
> interpretation of the CrossRef consortium and its proposed use of DOI
> is that the interlinking schema is an exclusionary one in that unless
> you are a member of the CrossRef group,

No, anyone can assign DOIs to their articles and load them into the
handle servers. CrossRef make it easy to discover DOIs that don't
easily map back to the pragmatic bibliographic data. I believe such
mapping should be free, but currently CrossRef charges for look ups.
I am hoping that will change.... APS uses pragmatic DOIs that don't
require lookups, but which are in CrossRef to ensure that all
publishers who wish to link to us can do so easily.

> your publications will not be
> interoperable with theirs. As CrossRef is dominated by large
> multinational publishers who hold a near monopoly on science
> publishing,

Actually, it isn't so dominated. For instance, the American
Physical Society is the third largest depositor of DOIs. We
at APS had been reluctant to join CrossRef in the beginning,
but I think the organization has proven to be rather
cooperative with third parties. For instance, we are
actively looking at supporting OpenURL (perhaps making
DOI->metadata look ups possible).

> and they have a decidedly loud voice of how the DOI
> standard is to be applied, this is what I take Stevan Harnad to meant
> as "click-through monopoly." (I am copying this message to Stevan in
> case I have misinterpreted Stevan's intent.)

True, CrossRef has a strong voice in future development of
the DOI. But I think is mostly because no other large
organization has jumped onto the DOI bandwagon yet.
  
> If you wish to learn more about some of the other open linking
> initiatives and their underlying principles, you may wish to read a
> couple of articles by Herbert Van de Sompel, who is very much involved
> with the Open Archive initiatives <www.openarchives.org>

I think DOI's offer some advantages, but I basically agree that
there should be many ways to discover DOIs or to generate links
to articles. It shouldn't be a closed environment. But I think
CrossRef has been quite receptive to leveraging the CrossRef system
to helping publishers fit into some of these other systems.

Cheers,
Mark

Mark Doyle
Manager, Product Development
The American Physical Society
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT

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