[Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

Roderic Page r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Mon Feb 15 06:40:50 CST 2010 

Dear Ed,

I guess one approach is economy of scale. Band together to form a  
larger group capable of funding them, or persuade a larger entity to  
stump up the money. Organisations such as GBIF , BHL, EOL, etc. could  
play a role in this. I suspect they may balk at this, but I'd argue  
that would display a lack of ambition.

Another approach is to develop and adopt a platform for publishing  
that includes DOIs as part of the package. Scratchpads could go down  
this route.

Regards

Rod

On 15 Feb 2010, at 12:04, Edward Baker wrote:

> 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
> --------------------
> edwbaker at gmail.com | edward.baker at nhm.ac.uk | e.baker at physics.org
> Skype: ewb1985 | Mobile: 07761807048 | Twitter: edwbaker
> phasmida.speciesfile.org | phasmid-study-group.org
> mauritiusbeetles.myspecies.info
>
>
> 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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---------------------------------------------------------
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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