[Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

[Geoff Read]

Yes, there are those fees, but the annual fee is insignificant, and the
non-cross linking fee is a penalty fee which shouldn't apply.

http://www.crossref.org/02publishers/20pub_fees.html

The fees are openly known and not big.

When Stephen made his comment about huge expense I had assumed he meant
partly the data entry workload, probably rather burdensome for Zootaxa.

Geoff


>>> On 17/02/2010 at 1:20 p.m., Stephen Thorpe <s.thorpe at auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:
> 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.