
DOI use on Reddit – results from recent dump - afandian
http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/09/dois-in-reddit.html
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cooper12
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but based on the author's descriptions of
DOIs, they're not completely linkrot-proof. The issue is that it's just a
link. The link itself could disappear or the publisher or even the metadata
itself. I don't know what steps publications take to preserve DOI's but it
sound like on their own they only protect against page moves. To really combat
linkrot you need to provide as much metadata as possible, mainly title and
authors but other data could also help tracking stuff down. Lastly even if you
figure out what the DOI points to, the pdf might be gone; that's why archiving
services like the wayback machine or webcite are so important. I'm glad
they're doing something about it though; I find that a lot of my bookmarks 404
after only a few months. Webmasters need to realize that a URL is just like an
address and that you need to set up a forwarding address.

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afandian
Author here. You're not wrong. There's nothing magical about DOIs or everyone
would use them for everything and there would be no link rot. You can only
update links if you know when and where things are moving, and you're still
around to do it.

Scholarly publishing is an area where documents need to stick around for a
long time, be able to be cited in a well-understood way, etc etc.

Crossref is an trade association of scholarly publishers, formed to solve
exactly this problem. Part of the deal when a publisher joins Crossref is an
obligation to keep the links up to date and a plan for what happens if the
publisher suddenly vanishes into thin air.

Initiatives like CLOCKSS address the archiving question
[http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home](http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home) .
The CLOCKSS homepage has a good overview.

And to the 'tracking stuff down' point, the DOI is resolvable (i.e. a link you
can click) but it's also an ID that you can look up in a database. DOIs
predate the web and may live longer than it. Having a single, 'official' ID
(whatever it looks like) is better than searching by metadata.

~~~
cooper12
> An obligation to keep the links up to date and a plan for what happens if
> the publisher suddenly vanishes into thin air.

It's good to hear that scholars are getting together and trying to mitigate
the volatility of URLs. I'll definitely need to read more on the subject to
understand the pros and cons so thank you for your introduction in the
article; many specialist blogs tend to only write for their specific audience.
It seems like DOIs are an ample solution as long as they aren't a single point
of failure.

~~~
afandian
Crossref's been around for 15 years (and DOIs longer than that). The Crosstech
blog has a lot of posts on the subject. You can start here
[http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers](http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers)

Here's a short list of posts that will give some background:

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids-
without...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids-without-
stabbing-myself-in-the-eyeball.html)

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi-
outag...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi-outage-
followup-report.html)

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-
and...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and-
persistently-identify-published-trustworthy-citable-online-scholarly-
literature-right.html)

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_s...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_some_conc.html)

