Re: [Ref-Links] DOIs used for reference linking

[Eric Hellman <eric@hellman.net>]

I think the hard parts of reference linking involve humans and the easy
parts involve computers. Programs, rules and algorithms are trivial to
manage; convincing people to behave responsibly is almost impossible to do
absent a big stick.

I also have great hopes for the DOI mechanism, but I'm skeptical that it
will  successfully address the problems caused by publishers' poor
management of information resources across acquisitions, management
changes, bankruptcies and the like.

The rule you describe is not hard to implement in a well-designed
algorithmic system. I can think of hard ones, but yours is not one of them.

Both algorithmic systems and a central database present the same problem to
Publisher Y. Publisher Y has to inform the world of its intent to change
the URLs of a lot of documents. Which is easier for Publisher Y, updating
100,000 DOI's in a central database, or updating a few algorithms in a few
central algorithm databases? More to the point, if publisher x has been
forced out of business due to incompetence, in which approach is it easier
to clean up the mess that's left behind?

Eric



At 1:31 PM -0400 4/6/99, dsidman@wiley.com wrote:
>In any case, all "link processor" type approaches still need maintenance in a
>central place, but in this case it's maintenance of a set of programs, rules
>and algorithms.  As hard as it might be to maintain a central database, I
>think it's much harder to maintain a central application, or set of
>algorithms.  This may seem simple at first on the assumption that citation
>data can be converted into URLs, but in the real world I think this will be
>much more fragile - especially over time, as all the individual publishers'
>rules change dynamically.  For example, this might require that the central
>algorithm not only needs to keep up with the new rules, but also to keep
>track of considerations like:  "Well, from March 2000 to July 2001, Publisher
>X used such-and-such a URL-construction algorithm, but then changed it to
>such-and-such other algorithm in July 2001 but only for its genetics
>journals, which in January 2002 it then sold to Publisher Y, so all
>references after that date can only be pointed to based on the new
>publisher's algorithm at that time..."  To try and construct reliable
>references based on this kind of consideration would be extremely difficult.
Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           Tools for 21st Century Scholarly Publishing

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