[Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

Mon Feb 15 06:04:15 CST 2010

DOIs are good. But they are too expensive for a number of journals produced
by small (albeit dedicated) groups. This is something I would like to see an
answer to.

Edward Baker
--------------------
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On 15 February 2010 11:56, Donat Agosti <agosti at amnh.org> wrote:

> I second Rod. We need DOI, we need the Cross Ref for biodiversity.
>
> And we need to end to make us extract manually this information for the
> 17,000+ new taxa, plus about 50,000 redescriptions we produce each year.
>
> We need to stop wasting time correcting slightly to very wrong references,
> names, geographic names.
>
> Even we will not be able to imitate Google by doing all the extraction by
> machine, this has to be our goal.
>
> The goal has to be to offer the publishers DOIs or similar for our
> biodiversity heritage literature, all the names, collecting events,
> morphological terms, image and gene bank entries, etc.
>
> We need to build the respective databases as much as we need to come up
> with
> formats including all the necessary semantic enhancements as well as the
> links to external resources that are stable.
>
> The more of the external resources are at our fingertips, the less
> additional work it will be to use them. Similarly, if we have journal
> production work flows that include at the author level tools to embed all
> those links and enhancements, we avoid later on a great deal of waste by
> extracting the information. This, I think, is saving a huge amount of
> duplication and error production.
>
> Finally, only this opens the door of the huge body of knowledge to the
> wider
> audience and thus makes taxonomy a relevant science.
>
> Donat
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page
> Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 1:45 PM
> To: TAXACOM
> Subject: [Taxacom] In defense of DOIs
>
> Dear Stephen,
>
> In one of your recent posts (http://markmail.org/message/fokdb5ipl2th2b4k
>  ) you "applaud Zootaxa for not wanting to enter into the DOI money-
> go-round, which would have resulted in less new taxonomy being
> published due to more time/money being wasted on pointless beauracracy
> [sic]."
>
> I'm as much against  pointless bureaucracy as anybody, but I'm not
> sure you are aware of the benefits DOIs bring to electronic
> publication. DOIs underpin stable citation linking in modern journals,
> and have several advantages over raw URLs.
>
> 1. Every time they changed web site technology there was a good chance
> URLs to articles would change, breaking existing links. DOIs hide this
> using indirection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirection ).
>
> 2. When publishers merge or are acquired (e.g., Wiley and Blackwell)
> the DOIs don't change, whereas the URLs to the articles do (publishers
> don't want their URLs "branded" with the names of former rivals that
> they have bought out). This means users can blissfully ignore who is
> publishing the content, the links "just work".
>
> 3. If the list of literature cited on an article web page use URLs,
> then a publisher is effectively branding their content with URLs to
> rival publishers. DOIs "hide" this, making linking much more palatable
> to publishers.
>
> But the real benefits come from the services provided by CrossRef
> (http://www.crossref.org
>  )that underlie DOIs. For example,
>
> 1. Given a DOI I can retrieve details about the publication (e.g.,
> article title, journal, etc.). No more typing bibliographies. This
> service has spawned a whole ecosystem of bibliographic tools such as
> http://www.connotea.org
> ,  http://citeulike.org, http://www.zotero.org, and
> http://www.mendeley.com
>  that make it easy to manage bibliographies online (these sites are
> also generating social networks of researchers on the back of this
> service).
>
> 2. Given article metadata I can find the DOI (if it exists). This
> service enables publishers to convert lists of papers cited to
> actionable links. It also enables sites such as Wikipedia to
> automatically convert citations into clickable links.
>
> But there is more. Given that when a publisher registers an article
> with CrossRef the publisher can submit a list of DOIs for the
> publications cited by that article, CrossRef can provide "forward
> linking", which means that for any article the publisher can list not
> only the papers cited, but who is citing that article.
>
> Imagine an article in Nature that cites a publication in, say,
> Zootaxa. At the moment, the Nature article has no link to the Zotaxa
> paper. The reader has to Google the paper. Furthermore, once they find
> the Zootaxa paper, the reader has no information on who has cited that
> paper. If I was a Zootaxa author, I'd love to know what papers were
> citing my work.
>
> I fully accept that DOIs add additional work load and cost to
> publication, and that these are not trivial considerations. But please
> don't dismiss DOIs as pointless bureaucracy. I'd argue DOIs have been
> an extraordinary success, and the academic publishing landscape would
> be a mess without them (or services that provided the same
> functionality).
>
> Lastly, imagine if we had similar services for the other things we
> care about, such as taxonomic names and specimens. Services that gave
> us metadata about these things, as well as told us how they are
> interrelated (e.g., this name was published in this article, this
> specimen is the holotype for this name, etc.). In other words,
> something like CrossRef for biology. This is why I'm in  biodiversity
> informatics -- I want a CrossRef for biodiversity.
>
> Regards
>
> Rod
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Roderic Page
> Professor of Taxonomy
> DEEB, FBLS
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>
> Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
> AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
> Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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