At 09:16 12/02/01 +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Your interpretation is correct. DOI is proprietary, OAI is open. See: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm
In the context of the debate below there are a number of subtle distinctions that might be worth making to avoid confusion. Also, it is important to define what 'open' applies to. In one sense, DOI is no more proprietary than OAI. It is based on an open technology, the Handle server used to resolve the DOI identifiers. Anyone can build an ID scheme based on the Handle server DOI is a particular ID scheme administered by a 'not-for-profit membership organization', the DOI Foundation. True, it represents the interests mostly of large commercial publishers, but the principal barrier to participation is the DOI-F's wish to preserve the integrity of the scheme and DOI-based resolver services by restricting those who can assign DOIs to works and who can operate resolvers. The OAi makes metadata available to describe works, but doesn't mandate access to works. In this sense OAi is more open to service providers, those who collect data from data, but not from the point of view of all data providers and users. CrossRef is a proprietary reference linking service between journal publishers. It is open to data providers/publishers who want to pay. In this sense it is perhaps less discriminatory than DOI-F. It is an implementation of the DOI. Neither DOI nor CrossRef 'block' access to works. They improve access for those who are able to pay. The 'blocking', i.e. the price that has to be paid to access journals, is already in place. There is an idea that DOI will track usage of rights-based materials to prevent unauthorised copying. Maybe that's what is meant by the claim below that "the underlying goal of the initiative is essentially to block access to the referred journal literature". OAi doesn't have an 'associated open citation linking mechanism', yet. One distinction that needs to be made about 'open' linking is whether open applies to the software that applies the links, to the ability of the format to present the links, to the ability of the user's service to provide the links, or to the ability of the user's service to retrieve a document using a link. I'll assume that this correspondence is concerned with the latter two. In this respect it is true to say that CrossRef linking is 'exclusionary', but it doesn't necessarily follow that unless you are a member of CrossRef 'your publications will not be interoperable with theirs'. It is possible that publishers will make information about journals and papers available in OAi tagged form, perhaps using Eprints.org software because it is convenient and cost-effective. This provides a degree of interoperability, and doesn't directly provide links or access to works, but could be the basis of both. It is certainly in publishers' interests to be open and interoperable at this level at least, whether participants in CrossRef or not. An additional couple of points on reference linking services and systems. SFX is a proprietary system and not the basis of OAi (it's concerned with the 'appropriate copy' problem, which is a library issue rather than the global OAi issue). Herbert Van de Sompel, one of the developers of SFX, is however a primary mover in OAi, and so a better paper to start with is The UPS Prototype: An Experimental End-User Service across E-Print Archives http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-ups/02vandesompel-ups.html The original jake is a database of journals rather than a reference linking service, although a version of it is now available through an Openly Inc. server as a linking service http://jake.openly.com/ Openly's strategy is to design truly open environments in the hope of stimulating use, and then offering the best tools and services for the environment they created. This is an increasingly complex area, but I think it is important to identify the objectives of an initiative to understand its context, instead of applying labels that might be inadvertently pejorative and obscure rather than clarify. Steve