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I was invited recently to present parliamentary evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on the subject of Research Integrity. For those not familiar with the arcane workings of the British Parliamentary system, a Select Committee is essentially the place where governments, and government bodies, are held to account. So it was refreshing to be invited to a hearing that wasn’t about Brexit.

The interest of the British Parliament in the integrity of scientific research confirms just how far science’s ongoing “reproducibility crisis” has reached. The fact that a large proportion of the published literature cannot be reproduced is clearly problematic, and this call to action from MPs is very welcome. And why would the government not be interested? At stake is the process of how new knowledge is created, and how reliable that purported knowledge is.

Tony’s post highlights Knol’s “service” URIs. Another issue is that many Knol entries have nice long lists of unlinked references. The HTML code behind the references is very sparse. Might the DOI be of use in linking out from these references? I think so. Then, of course, there’s the issue of DOIs for Knols…

With Library of Congress sometime back (Feb. ’08) announcing LCCN Permalinks and NLM also (Mar. ’08) introducing simplified web links with its PubMed identifier one might be forgiven for wondering what is the essential difference between a DOI name and these (and other) seemingly like-minded identifiers from a purely web point of view. Both these identifiers can be accessed through very simple URL structures:

With Library of Congress sometime back (Feb. ’08) announcing LCCN Permalinks and NLM also (Mar. ’08) introducing simplified web links with its PubMed identifier one might be forgiven for wondering what is the essential difference between a DOI name and these (and other) seemingly like-minded identifiers from a purely web point of view. Both these identifiers can be accessed through very simple URL structures:

• https://lccn.loc.gov/2003556443

  • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16481614 (although https://web.archive.org/web/20090106151604/http://pubmed.com/1386390 also works as noted here)

  And the DOI itself can be resolved using an equally simple URL structure:

  • http://dx.doi.org/10.1000/1

  So, why does DOI not just present itself as a simple database number which is accessed through a simple web link and have done with it, e.g. a page for the object named by the DOI “10.1000/1” is retrieved from the DOI proxy server at http://dx.doi.org/?

  Essentially the typical DOI link presents an elementary web-based URL which performs a useful redirect service. What is different about this and, say a PURL, which offers a similar redirect service? What’s the big deal?

  (Continues below.)

As the range of public services (e.g. RSS) offered by publishers has matured this gives rise to the question: How can they expose their public data so that a user may discover them? Especially, with DOI there is now in place a persistence link infrastructure for accessing primary content. How can publishers leverage that infrastructure to advantage? Anyway, I offer this figure as to how I see the current lie of the land as regards DOI services and data.

So, why is it just so difficult to reference OpenURL? Apart from the standard itself (hardly intended for human consumption - see abstract page here and PDF and don’t even think to look at those links - they weren’t meant to be cited!), seems that the best reference is to the Wikipedia page. There is the OpenURL Registry page at http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/servlet/OAIHandler?verb=ListSets but this is just a workshop. Not much there beyond the OpenURL registered items.

Hadn’t really noticed before but was fairly gobsmacked by this notice I just saw on the DOI® Handbook: **Please note that Chapter 9, Operating Procedures is for Registration Agency personnel only.** DOI® Handbook doi:10.1000/182 http://www.doi.org/hb.html And, indeed, the Handbook’s TOC only reconfirms this: 9 Operating procedures* *The RA password is required for viewing Chapter 9. 9.1 Registering a DOI name with associated metadata 9.2 Prefix assignment 9.3 Transferring DOI names from one Registrant to another

<span >Just a couple comments about CrossTech: <span >1. Shouldn’t it (or couldn’t it) be linked to from the Crossref home page? (This is a public read list after all and so should be made more widely available.) Maybe at some point could be announced on some lists of interest. <span >2. Would be very nice to (at least) have a count of membership. I would also like to canvas opinions about making names of the membership public.

At last week’s PRISM Face to Face meeting at Time Inc. (NY), Linda Burman raised the question of how (STM) publishers were using PRISM beyond RSS. I gave a brief presentation of how we at Nature were using PRISM: RSS (well you all know about that), Connotea (our social bookmarking tool), SRU (Search/Retrieve by URL), and OTMI (Open Text Mining Interface - which we’ll shortly be making available for wider comment).

On the iSpecies blog Rod Page describes how he extracts DOIs from Google Scholar results - he does use the Crossref OpenURL interface and Connotea to get DOIs too. He also says “DOIs are pretty cool” which is good!

On another blog post to SemAnt Page describes how he uses LSIDs and DOIs for Ant literature.

It seems that there is more and more of this type of use of the DOI so its great we have the OpenURL interface. Could the type of stuff that Page is doing be helped by publishers embedding metadata in their HTML pages? This could include licensing info and information for search engine crawlers.

Posted by special permission from EPS

EPS INSIGHTS :: 01/08/2006

SEMANTIC WEB: GOOGLE HAS THE ANSWERS, BUT NOT THE QUESTIONS

• The Google v. Semantic Web discussion at the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) featured plenty of confrontation and even some rational argument, but it may chiefly be remembered as the day when Google responded to the challenge of semantic web thinking by saying that the semantic web movement did not matter - thereby demonstrating that it did.

by David Worlock, Chairman