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.