nature.com/2021/11/17/news/
versus:
10.1038.123.366.345643
And you ask what I mean. What I mean is the first one is transparently better in several ways.
If I got the syntax wrong, just focus on the first part then, nature.com versus 10.1083. One is more readable than the other.
https://www.nature.com/articles/1771046b0
to
10.1038/1771046b0
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04114-w
to
10.1038/s41586-021-04114-w https://www.nature.com/articles/1771046b0
has
<meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.1038/1771046b0"/>
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04114-w
has
<meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04114-w"/>But yes that’s interesting and good to know that sometimes they can choose to use corresponding components in the URL versus DOI.
Indeed, I was wondering why not to adopt an approach similar to a Git repo where each leaf (document) is identified with a ref hash.
It could be used with a publisher prefix to segment the hash-space.
Basically, it's a repository of metadata. Each publisher could equally host the whole repo, but extend only their corresponding sub-repo.
The central entity could then maintain the publisher's name-to-id convenience xref and some search facility.
can be a valid DOI, 10.1038 has the same role as the nature.com domain but with a different governance
The resolvability of a DOI is obviously important, and you have found a few examples where the steward of the content (ie publisher) hasn’t updated the links. But in that case DOIs can in theory be redirected to archived versions. That's the price you pay for a large, diverse community of publishers. Don't imagine that publishers would magically be any better at fixing their own websites.
But more broadly, as identifiers, having an agreed scheme helps link publications, datasets, other entities such as funders and institutions. It allows discovery of metadata in a way that’s discoverable by all.
Someone will want to follow those links in 100 years and whatever state DNS or WWW is in, the metadata will be in an open archive somewhere.
(I'm at Crossref, AMA)
Just now I tried searching Scholix via the web interface for IDs that are linked in Dryad, which is supposed to use the same linking system, and in either direction came up empty.
TIA for any clues!
If a DataCite member registers a data set, and mentions a link to a Crossref DOI, that's almost certainly a dataset-article link. Vice versa.
So the data in Scholix is the union of "what citations do article publishers and dataset publishers think exist".
We're working on improving how we process the data citation data, but ultimatley can't improve on what Publishers provide.
Sorry, a bit of a non-answer.
I think the real problem is the centralized vs federated vs distributed nature of it. IPFS is a good example of how that could have looked; not sure if it could be moved into that space somehow (I'm sure it could in theory, but in practice?)