Jony Hudson <jonyepsi...@gmail.com> writes: > On Thursday, 15 May 2014 14:58:50 UTC+1, Phillip Lord wrote: >> >> >> Again, based on the dubious ID that an DOI "makes things citable". >> >> A URL is already citable! >> > > Well, there's no shortage of broken links out there to suggest that people > have trouble keeping content associated with stable URLs. The main value of > DOI, IMHO, is they're an explicit commitment to make something persistently > available - just what you want for citations.
Actually, they don't. I've broken quite a few DOIs in my time. What they offer is the guarantee that a DOI will not be handed out twice. So, you avoid the situation where a domain name is unregistered, someone else buys it, and the links are replaced with porn. Now, there is an explicit commitment from crossref (one of the nine bodies that hands out DOIs) over the way that the DOI resolves and what is resolves to. But the strength of this commitment comes from a social and legal agreement, not a technological one. So, URIs such as http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ offer the same guarantee of stability. Indeed, the display standard for representing DOIs is that is represented as a URI. So URIs are not intrinsincally unstable. And the W3C URL has the *big* advantage that it does not require a two-step resolution. So, the URI that you see in your browser is the URI that you use. With a DOI, the URI is a passing, ephemeral thing. DOIs are treated as some sort of magic -- figshare use the "make data citable" tagline largely on the basis of "hey, it's got a DOI"; I find this over-simplistic. DOIs have their place, but it is not everywhere, and they are not automatically better than a URI. Phil -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
