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[Ref-Links] Re[2]: [Ref-Links] DOIs used for reference linking
Thanks to Mark for posting his interesting paper and
comments.
The APS Link Manager is very similiar to the IDEAL Links
system. While we allow, amongst other things, traditional
citation data (ISSN, volume, first page) to be used for links
to IDEAL, we also accept DOIs (see attached idealink.pdf).
Using DOIs or traditional citation data isn't an either/or
situation. With reference links there will always be two
things - the traditional citation plus a URL (either a DOI or
an "intelligent" code or a DOI made up of an intelligent
code).
The main drawbacks I see with Mark's distributed, algorithmic
(my label) linking proposal are:
*every linker needs to know the algorithm of every linkee -
this means work is distributed and the algorithm metadata
must be distributed. (non-trivial for the likes of ISI and
for publishers with a multidisciplinary set of journals).
This is really how things happen now and there is agreement
it's not scaleable.
*the linker needs to take a journal title abbreviation from
a citation, identify the publisher and then apply the
algorithm (including any non-standard journal abbreviation,
ISSN or Coden)
*the linker has no way of knowing if the cited article is
available online unless they have metadata about the online
availability of the journals. (at the moment, even with the
IDEAL Links system, we have to send article metadata to
those linking to IDEAL so they know what's there and get
ISSNs)
Some things need to happen before the DOI system can work as
a scaleable solution, but the idea is that publishers will
take citations and batch submit them to a central service to
be matched to DOIs. This requires a metadata database and a
matching service - both seen as a critical applications by
IDF members. In this scenario the publisher, or linker,
doesn't need to know anything about the cited journal or its
publisher. It could be very easy to submit citations and
get back DOIs that can be used for linking.
With the DOI there is nothing stopping a publisher
incorporating their algorithmic identifiers into a DOI.
Academic Press is using is own article identifier as the
DOI, which means that the DOI is integrated with our
internal databases and systems. We found it fairly easy to
implement DOIs and create metadata incorporating those DOIs.
Regards,
Ed
-----
Ed Pentz
Academic Press
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: [Ref-Links] DOIs used for reference linking
Author: Mark Doyle <doyle@aps.org> at ~internet
Date: 3/24/99 5:53 PM
Hi,
On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Norman Paskin wrote:
> We have now produced a proposal for the use of DOIs for reference
> linking.
[...]
> Comments are welcome.
I am reading this on the Ref-Links mailing list and I am only replying in
this forum. If this is of sufficient interest for the other lists, as
judged by someone familiar with them, will forward these comments there. I
apologize upfront for the length of my remarks and their devil's advocate
nature.
I suppose I should take a moment to introduce myself. I am a physicist by
training, but no longer do active research. I worked with Paul Ginsparg
for several years on the Los Alamos e-Print Archive (http://xxx.lanl.gov/)
and now I work for the American Physical Society in our Journal
Information Systems R&D dept. My main responsibilities include our
Physical Review Online Archive (http://prola.aps.org/) and the APS link
manager (http://publish.aps.org/linkfaq.html) and our inter-publisher
linking relationships.
My view towards citing and reference linking is distinctly pragmatic (as
will be amply clear from what follows). Attached below is a PDF file of a
talk I have prepared for the ICCC/IFIP Third Conference on Electronic
Publishing '99 in Ronneby, Sweden in May
(http://www5.hk-r.se/ElPub99.nsf/). The talk is about the pragmatic
approaches the APS has taken to addressing some of the issues being
debated here. It is somewhat pedestrian in nature, but I think it
highlights some important aspects of the problems of citing and linking.
Comments on the paper are welcome.
The main problem that I have with using DOIs as the basis for citing and
linking references to scholarly journal articles is that it needlessly
tries to throw away the current scheme, a scheme that has been in use for
hundreds of years and has proven robust and stable. Namely, an article (I
am going to attempt to use the terms as defined in the proposal) is cited
by a subset of the (usually hierarchial) metadata that derives from the
peer-review process. For instance, Physical Review articles are cited by
(author, journal, volume, page, year). Conspicuously absent are the issue
number, title, ISSN, coden, PII, etc.
I believe the DOI proposal for reference linking errs when it regards this
subset of metadata as only applicable to a physical manifestation of the
work. It is, of course, true that such citations are tied to the printed
book, but they work perfectly well as a way to access an electronic
manifestation of the articles, especially when a "wrapper" is created that
supplies links to all of the alternative electronic manifestations
(availibility of which may vary with time). One does face the problem of
how to identify articles independently of the papyrocentric pagination.
This we have solved pragmatically by generalizing the page number to
a six digit "electronic identifier".
This number looks like a page number for the most part, but it works for
both the printed book (if it is even produced) and the online version. In
particular, the identifiers have modest intelligence built in so that the
article can be found on a library book shelf just as easily as if a page
number were given, i.e., the numerical ordering of the identifiers matches
the editorially supplied table of contents ordering, even though the
latter doesn't fully exist until an issue is completed. In a purely online
journal, an "issue" would just be a collection of articles published
during a convenient time period. Researchers, libraries, A&I services, and
other databases have been able to immediately integrate the electronic
identifier into what they do because it is transparently akin to a page
number.
The APS link manager provides an interface that is built upon the metadata
subset used to cite the articles we publish. In particular, the
construction of the URL can be accomplished by plugging in the metadata to
a simple template. No lookups are required. The simple generalization of
the page number and the simple link interface (which takes one to the
wrapper for the article) elevates the traditional citation from one for
the physical manifestation to one for the Work itself. This is no small
point - the whole point of the peer-review process is to attach a name to
a Work that conveys quality assurance as well as "brand" (the value added
to an article derived from being part of a larger collection of similarly
selected articles).
The proposal calls for recommending DOIs as "the declared identifier in a
citation" and for DOIs to remain "dumb". This I think will not work. I do
not believe that researchers will be willing to use long, dumb identifiers
directly in their citations, especially when there are simpler schemes
that will suffice. During the transition period when publishers will have
both digital and physical manifestations, I do not think it wise to
introduce multiple citations for a single work. Some publishers (at least
one in physics) adopted the DOI for articles that are published online
before they are printed. When the articles is printed, a second citation
is produced. Researchers will thus cite the article in multiple ways,
making it harder to track and locate the article in its different
manifestations.
The other ingredient that is missing from the DOI proposal is an explicit
interface for accessing the database via the metadata. By far the most
important way of interfacing with the database is going to be querying the
database to get a DOI (and ultimately the URL) associated with the
(traditionally cited subset of) metadata. This interface will have to be
standardized and robust. With such an interface in place though, one must
pause and wonder what the addition of the DOI brings to the table. If the
query can be based on the metadata, why not leave it at that?
Finally (this e-mail is longer than I intended), one should carefully think
about the error handling that is possible when a link is being resolved. If
someone makes a mistake in the metadata (transposes some digits in a page
number or a DOI for example), where does that leave the person attempting
to follow the link? A solution like the APS link manager is tightly
integrated with our definitive manuscript database and this can be used to
the fullest to assist the user in resolving the error. At worst, the user
has found herself at the appropriate site and can follow links to suitable
search engines or tables of contents to locate the wrongly cited article. A
centralized server will need to work harder
to get the user moving on the correct path again.
So, from my pragmatic point of view, publishers can straightfowardly
generalize traditional (journal, volume, page) cites into an identifier
for the work and not just a particular manifestation and supply stable and
robust linking based upon this extension. A project like Eric Hellman's
SLinkS would provide a lighter weight centralized way of finding a
particular publishers URL template that can be used in simple algorithmic
constructions of stable and robust URLs based upon traditional citation
metadata (it is my belief that all publishers will have to supply such an
interface anyway). DOIs will surely find use in other spheres, but in the
limited domain of scholarly journal citations, I think there is a
fundamental mismatch between the generality of the DOI and the problem
domain.
Well, thanks for reading this far. The form of the solutions publishers
choose will have a great impact on the ease of adding the hyperlinking for
which the scholarly literature is so naturally suited. So far, it has
been our experience that simple interfaces based upon the commonly used
metadata have been the easiest to accomodate and result in the rapid
spread of linking.
Regards,
Mark
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