And has the value of "it doesn't go dead as easily" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier
> The DOI for a document remains fixed over the lifetime of the document, whereas its location and other metadata may change. Referring to an online document by its DOI should provide a more stable link than directly using its URL. But if its URL changes, the publisher must update the metadata for the DOI to maintain the link to the URL. It is the publisher's responsibility to update the DOI database. If they fail to do so, the DOI resolves to a dead link, leaving the DOI useless.
More about it at Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship - https://doi.org/10.7191%2Fjeslib.2021.1180
I thought thats why we had urls not only IP addresses ..
which reminds me, who has control over DOI.org ... eg. is it DOGE-safe ? likewise arXiv .. can it easily be co-opted / subsumed ?
I’ve met the folks behind DOI. Very nice people (Jonathan Clark in particular).
It’s an independent foundation and they have backups/contingency plans established with major universities to preserve the DOI records in the event the foundation fails.
Their whole organisation should have been a hash function...
DOI must die
Should be done with Web3.
Scientific publishing is one of the very few legit use cases for block-chains imo.
But magnet links and the BitTorrent mainline hash-table are a better DOI than DOI.
DOIs exist so they can be human readable and simultaneously indicate the source and veracity of it. They’re somewhat gated as well which serves a function.
Yet they are bad at every one of those points.
* An auto increment ID is just as human non-readable as a UUID, it's just easier to get silent collisions from typos.
* The Source is metadata that belongs in a metadata system, not into the ID itself
* the veracity is worthless without verifiability
* gated-ness is just an anti-feature caused by the lack of verifiability
If you you classify identifiers along different axis of their properties, you'll notice that DOIs actually inhabit the completely wrong quadrant for their use-case. (https://docs.rs/tribles/0.5.1/tribles/id/index.html)
Are they human readable? As for veracity, wouldn't baking a digital signature into the paper itself be far more reliable?
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they exist, but they appear to guard against humans who are lazy and make mistakes sometimes rather than against a powerful adversary motivated to interfere with science. It might be time for an upgrade.
Maybe it would be better to identify papers via a hash of their contents so that there's nothing to co-opt.
... theres an argument to having arXiv paper hashes, and/or important digitalia checksums put on a blockchain.
detect-ability of state-actor post-facto editing : DEI related or otherwise