[Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

Donat Agosti agosti at amnh.org
Mon Feb 15 10:51:17 CST 2010 

In the strict sense, DOI are issued by those publishing the content, ie
journals. That means, we could issue for forthcoming publications. But this
is not in this sense possible for legacy publications.

Why not decide on LSID or a handle and then stick to them for at least the
legacy literature. This way, there would be an alternative, and if there are
plenty of handles, publishers might accept them to complement DOIs?

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 4:11 PM
To: Edward Baker
Cc: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>> Taxacom Mailing List
>> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>>
>> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either  
>> of these
>> methods:
>>
>> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>>
>> Or (2) a Google search specified as:
>> site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>>
>>
>> __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus  
>> signature
>> database 4866 (20100214) __________
>>
>> The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.
>>
>> http://www.eset.com
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>> Taxacom Mailing List
>> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>>
>> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either  
>> of these
>> methods:
>>
>> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>>
>> Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:
>> mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either  
> of these methods:
>
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/ 
> pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>

---------------------------------------------------------
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







_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these
methods:

(1) http://taxacom.markmail.org

Or (2) a Google search specified as:
site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
 

__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature
database 4867 (20100215) __________

The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.

http://www.eset.com

More information about the Taxacom mailing list