The Winnower | DIY Scientific Publishing

"Digital object identifiers (DOIs) are much sought-after commodities in the world of academic publishing. If you’ve never seen one, a DOI is a unique string associated with a particular digital object (most commonly a publication of some kind) that lets the internet know where to find the stuff you’ve written. For example, say you want to know where you can get a hold of an article titled, oh, say, Designing next-generation platforms for evaluating scientific output: what scientists can learn from the social web. In the real world, you’d probably go to Google, type that title in, and within three or four clicks, you’d arrive at the document you’re looking for. As it turns out, the world of formal resource location is fairly similar to the real world, except that instead of using Google, you go to a website called dx.DOI.org, and then you plug in the string ’10.3389/fncom.2012.00072′, which is the DOI associated with the aforementioned article. And then, poof, you’re automagically linked directly to the original document, upon which you can gaze in great awe for as long as you feel comfortable. Historically, DOIs have almost exclusively been issued by official-type publishers: Elsevier, Wiley, PLoS and such. Consequently, DOIs have had a reputation as a minor badge of distinction–probably because you’d traditionally only get one if your work was perceived to be important enough for publication in a journal that was (at least nominally) peer-reviewed. And perhaps because of this tendency to view the presence of a DOIs as something like an implicit seal of approval from the Great Sky Guild of Academic Publishing, many journals impose official or unofficial commandments to the effect that, when writing a paper, one shalt only citeth that which hath been DOI-ified. For example, here’s a boilerplate Elsevier statement regarding references (in this case, taken from the Neuron author guidelines): References should include only articles that are published or in press. For references to in press articles, please confirm with the cited journal that the article is in fact accepted and in press and include a DOI number and online publication date. Unpublished data, submitted manuscripts, abstracts, and personal communications should be cited within the text only. This seems reasonable enough until you realize that citations that occur 'within the text only' aren’t very useful, because they’re ignored by virtually all formal citation indices. You want to cite a blog post in your Neuron paper and make sure it counts? Well, you can’t! Blog posts don’t have DOIs! You want to cite a what? A tweet? That’s just crazy talk! Tweets are 140 characters! You can’t possibly cite a tweet; the citation would be longer than the tweet itself! The injunction against citing DOI-less documents is unfortunate, because people deserve to get credit for the interesting things they say–and it turns out that they have, on rare occasion, been known to say interesting things in formats other than the traditional peer-reviewed journal article. I’m pretty sure if Mark Twain were alive today, he’d write the best tweets EVER ... Why does Elsevier hate 21st-century Mark Twain, you ask? I don’t know. But in general, I think there are two main reasons for the disdain many people seem to feel at the thought of allowing authors to freely cite DOI-less objects in academic papers. The first reason has to do with permanence—or lack thereof. The concern here is that if we allowed everyone to cite just any old web page, blog post, or tweet in academic articles, there would be no guarantee that those objects would still be around by the time the citing work was published, let alone several years hence ... The second reason has to do with quality. Here, the worry is that we can’t just have authors citingany old opinion someone else published somewhere on the web, because, well, think of the children! ... To be fair, I think there’s some merit to both of these concerns. Or at least, I think there used to be some merit to these concerns ... "