RE: DOI and other identifiers

This is all correct with regard to Crossref DOIs, which are the overwhelming majority of DOIs currently issued, and which are the ones Ivan is describing. I agree 100% with his comments wrt _Crossref_ DOIs, which are essential and ubiquitous for scholarly literature.

But there are many other Registration Agencies (RAs), each of which registers DOIs for a specific purpose and each of which associates specific metadata with the DOIs it registers and manages. For example, EIDR is an entertainment industry DOI. DataCite is used for data sets, as you might guess. Different DOIs. Different metadata. It is not uncommon for Crossref DOIs to be linked to the DataCite DOI of the data set on which the research they're talking about is based, and vice-versa. Good stuff.

More relevant to this discussion, and as another example, the EU Publications Office is a Registration Agency for official publications of the European Union. There are thousands of them every year, because they cover any publication of any official agency within any of the countries of the EU. Tons. So yes, there's a cost for them to maintain the registry and issue the DOIs; that's a cost of doing business for the Publications Office of the European Union based in Luxembourg. But they don't charge for the DOIs. All such publications have to get sent to them, and all of them get DOIs. And they all have metadata associated with them—in fact, apropos a separate but related discussion about subject taxonomies, they are actually catalogued using the EuroVoc vocabulary by professional cataloguers. No cost to the publishing agency; it's considered essential to the management of the EU's publications (and is a Very Good Thing, imo). Those publications could _also_ get Crossref DOIs. Some of them do.

I happen to be seeing Dan Whaley in a couple of days—I recruited him as a speaker for the IDPF DigiCon conference in Chicago. So Dan, be forewarned that I may accost you with a question about whether hypothes.is—or the Annotating All Knowledge project—would consider becoming an RA. It would actually not be a huge (I mean _yuge_) stretch to do that (unless, wrt the latter project, it was deemed more appropriate for Crossref to take that on—they're one of the partners in that initiative) .

But in the context of this discussion, I would _not_ advocate that any such RA or any specific DOI issued by such an RA should be considered canonical at this time by this WG. Such an Annotations RA, and the metadata they require to maintain the registry of annotations associated with the DOIs they issue, is a _service_ they would be providing. There would be at least two or three gazillion annotations for which such a registration would not be appropriate or practical.

--Bill Kasdorf

From: Ivan Herman [mailto:ivan@w3.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2016 2:46 AM
To: Robert Sanderson
Cc: W3C Public Annotation List
Subject: Re: DOI and other identifiers


On 6 May 2016, at 21:02, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com<mailto:azaroth42@gmail.com>> wrote:


All,

On the call today we briefly discussed the use of other identifiers for annotations, such as DOIs.

While there's no problem assigning a DOI to an Annotation, assuming that CrossRef or some other registration agency is willing to manage the potential drastic increase in registrations,

Note that, afaik, assigning DOI-s is not free. An organization (typically a publisher) pays to have the right to issue DOI-s, afaik. I am not sure how this will play with the business model of annotation, except when the annotation (ie, an instance of Hypothes.is<http://hypothes.is>, for example) runs on the site of such an institution...


there are some questions it brings up for the working group.

* Is the DOI the canonical identifier for the Annotation?

If it isn't, then why mint one at all? To me, it defeats the purpose to have a DOI if it's not the canonical identifier for the resource.  The value of DOIs is when the publisher of the content changes, the citations and references remain the same.

Absolutely. In the academic world, a DOI is exactly that: it is a canonical identifier for a scholarly work (regardless of the format it is presented and/or downloaded). If, as Dan said, some annotations become scholarly outputs on their own right, hence they get a DOI, then it *is* the canonical identifier for that annotation.




If it isn't, should we have a place in the model to capture it?  Currently there's only the URI of the current location (id), the canonical URI (canonical) and the URIs of other locations from where the current representation was derived (via).  As the annotation would be new, it's neither id nor via.
I agree with Doug that non canonical aliases are best served via an extension, and would resist adding in an 'alternate' field to the core model, as it serves almost no purpose -- if you have the annotation JSON description to read the alternate field, then why do you need to know where else you can get the same JSON from?

From my perspective, no change is needed, but it would be good to discuss :)

I fully agree.




* There was also some discussion around versioning.  From the DOI FAQ:

  7. If I have assigned a DOI name and I make a change to my material, should I assign a new DOI?

The IDF does not have any rules on this. Individual RAs adopt appropriate rules for their community and application. As a general rule, if the change is substantial and/or it is necessary to identify both the original and the changed material, assign a new DOI name.

+1. This is a social expectation, which we cannot, and should not, have any specific rules for…

Ivan




Rob

--
Rob Sanderson
Semantic Architect
The Getty Trust
Los Angeles, CA 90049


----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704