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

[Mark Doyle <doyle@aps.org>]

Greetings,

On Thu, 08 Apr 1999, "Dr. Guenther Eichhorn" wrote:

> 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).
[...]
> 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.

So what you are saying is that you have a stable, universal system that  
already exists that does not require DOIs to function robustly. What would  
adding DOIs achieve? The problem is that the rest of the STM world (well,  
the ST part anyway) doesn't have an ADS or Medline system. Hence the PubRef  
initiative.

Do you store a URL for every article or dynamically generate them based on  
publisher URL templates and the metadata? If a publisher updates their  
scheme, do you have to update thousands for records or a few lines of code?

Cheers,
Mark

Mark Doyle
Research and Development
The American Physical Society

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