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

["Dr. Guenther Eichhorn" <gei@head-cfa.harvard.edu>]

Hi all,

This is a very interesting discussion and it is especially interesting
to see in what direction this is going.

According to David Sidman:

> The only missing link so far in the scenario I've described is:  "How does 
> anyone FIND OUT the DOI for a given piece of content?"  I.e., once they know 
> the DOI they're home free, but how do they discover it?  This is where the 
> DOI metadata database comes in.  If in the same step in which publishers 
> register their DOIs, they also register a minimal amount of metadata about 
> the objects, then a simple lookup database would exist which would allow 
> people and systems to look up the DOIs based on a simple query.
>  
> One might argue that maintenance of a central database like this is unlikely 
> to be supported faithfully, but if doing so is part and parcel of the 
> registration/maintenance of the DOIs themselves, and can be executed in the 
> same operational process, quality-assured in the same pass, etc., then I 
> think it has an excellent chance of succeeding.  Furthermore, publishers will 
> have this metadata available for registration anyway, because internally they 
> will need it to tag and manage their own DOIs, prior to registering the DOIs 
> in the DOI directory.  How else could they control (internally) what their 
> various DOIs stand for, who (internally) are the various content "owners" 
> responsible for keeping the corresponding URLs up to date, etc.?

In the field of Astronomy we have had such a system for the last 5
years: The Astrophysics Data System (ADS).  The ADS allows you to
identify articles by either Journal/Volume/Page or by searching for
authors or titles.  The ADS then returns the information about the
article, together with a link to the on-line version at the publisher
(as well as other related links that are interesting for the end
users).

We currently use so-called bibcodes as identifiers for articles.
These bibcodes have been hugely successful in tying together all data
centers, journals and the central search system.  They have the
advantage that they can easily be user-generated.

Extending this system to opaque, publisher generated identifiers like
the DOI would be trivial.  All that needs to be done is for the
publishers to include these identifiers in the data that they send to
the ADS.  We would continue to maintain a concordance between the
publisher-generated opaque identifiers and the user-readable
bibcodes.  This would make it very easy for users or other service
providers to automatically create links to specific articles in the
ADS and through that to the publisher.

This system has been very successful in Astronomy and could easily be
extended into other fields.

Guenther Eichhorn
---------------------------------------------------
Dr. Guenther Eichhorn        |  gei@cfa.harvard.edu
Project Scientist            |  Phone: 617-495-7260
Astrophysics Data System     |  Fax:   617-496-7577
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
60 Garden Street, MS-83, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

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