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Use DOIs, they said. URLs are just transient, they said. But DOIs are permanent, they said.

Could it be that the whole DOI system was just a ruse by the commercial academic publishers to re-intermediate themselves between academic authors and readers in the age of the WWW?

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I really don't see DOIs as the problem here. They are just catalogue numbers, not an archive or repository.

The DOIs are still permanent, but their resolvers might not be. Copyright problems definitely makes that harder to fix, but again, I don't think the DOI is the problem here.

This is the equivalent of complaining that file hashes are useless because they don't contain the data originally stored in the file. That is not the purpose.

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