[Taxacom] In defense of DOIs

[Lynn Raw]

Jim,

I am not sure where you obtained this information. This is what appears on the official site:

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Lynn Raw
London, UK
 
On 16 Feb 2010, at 23:35, Edwards, James wrote:

> 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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