Maybe Persistent but Certainly Not Unique: On the Proliferation of DOIs in Open Access Book Publishing · Copim
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2025-03-17
Summary:
van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., Steiner, T., Hillen, H., & Higman, R. (2025). Maybe Persistent but Certainly Not Unique: On the Proliferation of DOIs in Open Access Book Publishing. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.fb6181fd
It is part and parcel of Thoth Open Metadata’s mission to make book dissemination more easily accessible to small- to medium-sized publishers of open access books. Broad dissemination to a variety of platforms such as the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Project MUSE, or to Jisc’s National Bibliographic Knowledgebase requires quality metadata, which is a task that Thoth Open Metadata is designed to facilitate.
Closely linked to good practice in metadata management is consistent usage of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs).undefined In general terms, PIDs are meant to provide reliable digital pointers to a resource (such as a document, data set, or publication). These digital pointers have two specific characteristics:
PIDs should remain stable over time. A PID counteracts link rot, which is the loss of working URLs over time. This happens, for example, when a publisher’s site ceases to exist, or resources are moved elsewhere in the digital sphere as the result of redesign, website upgrades, and so on.undefined
PIDs should be unique to provide one single “source of truth.” Names can be shared among multiple people, institutions may have multiple ways they are referred to. PIDs ideally provide a single, bijective relation between identifier and object.
The stability of PIDs is mainly predicated on their underlying infrastructure’s governance structure and design decisions about maintaining backward compatibility. A case in point is the recent sunsetting of the GRID PID for institutions and its absorption into the ROR PID,undefined and a similar integration of FundRef PIDs into the ROR dataset.undefined A comparable process recently took place in the realm of controlled vocabularies, with the discontinuation of BIC in favor of Thema codes for subject classification.undefined The uniqueness of PIDs, however, is a much more complex question that touches not only upon issues of governance and design, but also broader – dare we say, metaphysical – questions of “objectness”.
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