[Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

[Stephen Thorpe]

this contradicts other information I have from a publisher, who says that there is also an annual fee for the publisher, and a CrossRef Non-Linking Fee

Believe it or not, there is at least one publisher, prominent in taxonomic publishing today, for whom both costs and profits are kept to a minimum, motivated, I believe, by the biodiversity crisis to maximise taxonomic output ...

________________________________________
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Edwards, James [EDWARDSJL at si.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, 17 February 2010 12:35 p.m.
To: Frederick W. Schueler
Cc: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

Typical costs for DOIs range from US $.03 (yes, three cents!) to $20 per article. So they are unlikely to be the "huge expense" for a publisher that Stephen Thorpe fears.

Jim Edwards
________________________________________
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Frederick W. Schueler [bckcdb at istar.ca]
Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 6:01 PM
Cc: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

Stephen Thorpe wrote:
>
> I don't deny that DOIs are "useful", and indeed I use them on Wikispecies whenever possible, though to me they are useful primarily as links to publications, rather than as identifiers per se. The question though is whether they are useful ENOUGH to justify the huge expense? On that I (and notable others, as you know from the off-list discussion) am not so sure. Is it worthwhile for a publisher to do DOIs at the expense of taxonomic output? If Zootaxa could only publish say half of its current output with the added workload created by DOIs, would this be worthwhile? I would have more confidence in  DOIs as permanent links if they were independent of publishers, so a DOI actually linked to a page hosted by the DOI people, rather than to the publishers pages, and this could best be done with open access articles. Why should the publishers have to pay for DOIs when bioinformatics people are the ones who want the DOIs most? Just like the issue of all these global biodiversity
databases - they are (perhaps) nice to have, but are they worth it? Do they facilitate more taxonomy, or do they compete with more taxonomy?

* for those of us outside the loop, how much does a DOI for an article
cost? If this is large (as I gather it is), what's the explanation for
the cost?

fred.
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