Data citation metrics question

25 Feb 2019
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Dear data citation aficionados
There was a question going around our water group about DOIs vs uris for citation. Clearly many data journals strongly recommend DOIs but does anyone know if they are mandatory or just recommended?
And for an organisation capable of maintaining persistent identifiers, do they hold any intrinsic benefits over DOIs, e.g. in relation to the gathering of statistics around citations, e.g. h-index?
It seems crossref / datacite / scholix support other forms:
https://www.crossref.org/community/linking-data/
https://support.datacite.org/docs/connecting-research-outputs
Thanks
Matt
Matt Fry
Water Resources Systems Group
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  • Matthew Jones's picture

    Author: Matthew Jones

    Date: 25 Feb, 2019

    You might be interested in the 2017 McMurry et al. paper on "Identifiers
    for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent
    identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data":
    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414 They address many other
    identifier schemes that are in widespread use, including ARKs and CURIEs of
    various flavors. Anecdotally, it seems to me that the vast majority of
    cited data identifiers are of the RRID variety because it has had a longer
    history in the life sciences and the rest of us are just starting to catch
    up. Journals certainly accept them. And identifiers.org is a really
    amazing resolver a sit handles most of the common identifier formats.
    Matt
    --
    Matthew B. Jones
    http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0077-4738
    Director of Informatics R&D
    National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
    University of California Santa Barbara
    http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinfo
    PI, NSF Arctic Data Center
    https://arcticdata.io
    Director, DataONE program
    https://dataone.org

  • Roberto Di Cosmo's picture

    Author: Roberto Di Cosmo

    Date: 25 Feb, 2019

    Thanks for the link to this interesting article.
    Looking at it I found a lot of material on Digital Identifiers of Objects
    (DIOs), but no mention at all of Identifiers for Digital Objects (IDOs),
    so I think it could be interesting for this list to look at the following
    article that explains the distinction between DIOs and IDOs in details:
    Roberto Di Cosmo, Morane Gruenpeter, Stefano Zacchiroli
    "Identifiers for Digital Objects: the Case of Software Source Code Preservation"
    iPRES 2018 - 15th International Conference on Digital Preservation, 2018
    https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865790
    You may also look at n2t.org that is a metaresolver quite similar to
    identifiers.org, with a shorter prefix :-)
    --
    Roberto
    --
    Roberto Di Cosmo
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  • Christina Elsenga's picture

    Author: Christina Elsenga

    Date: 26 Feb, 2019

    Hello Matthew,
    IMO DOI is a brand that took on and handles are one type of technology for
    persistent identifiers. Actually DOI is based on handle technology. But how
    to explain this?
    And then there is ARK, EPIC, .. etc. Requirements differ a bit, services by
    external organisations are not the same all over and whatever you have to
    organise yourself to make it all work will differ.
    Please check out: https://www.project-freya.eu/en
    Best, Christina Elsenga

  • Roberto Di Cosmo's picture

    Author: Roberto Di Cosmo

    Date: 26 Feb, 2019

    Hi Christina,
    DOI, ARK, etc. etc. are all systems of DIOs (digital identifiers for objects)
    whose core technical underpinning is an architecture built around a (logically unique)
    registry associating a potentially meaningless (some say "opaque") identifier
    with a meaning (usully, but not always, the URL of a "landing page" describing
    the object).
    As a consequence, as clearly stated in the RFC for the Handle System [1],
    "persistence" is not an intrinsic property of DIOs, but a function of administrative care.
    All systems of DIOs are not born equal: for example, ARKs are technically
    superior when it comes to designating versions, subparts or variants of a
    digital object, as the syntactic structure of ARK identifiers allows to do this
    in a natural way.
    The reason why one particular system becomes popular and overshadows the others
    is usually a quite interesting subject for social sciences and economics, more
    than technical virtue: we are all still using today QWERTY keyboards that slow
    us down, and I had to spend quite a few years when I was younger writing code
    that had to cope with 64KB memory segments in the x86 processor family (really, that
    was masochisms :-)).
    AFAICT, DOI have been pushed forward by scientific printing houses when they had
    to undergo their digital transformation, while ARKs are today extremely popular
    among librarians, and from what I see these two communities could really benefit
    from increased cross fertilisation.
    On the other side, IDOs (Identifiers for Digital Objects), which are extremely
    popular in the software development community, are fundamentally different from
    DIOs and seem very little known in both of the above mentioned communities, and
    so I hope you will not mind if I keep pointing every now and then to the key
    article we ended up publishing in iPres 2018 to contribute to clarify these
    issues and build bridges among the different communities [2].
    Cheers
    --
    Roberto
    [1] "The only operational connection between a handle andthe entity it names is
    maintained within the Handle System. This of course does not guarantee
    persistence, which is a function of administrative care."
    S. Sun, L. Lannom, and B. Boesch. 2003. Handle System Overview. RFC 3650.
    [2] see https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865790 for a discussion
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  • Carlo Maria Zwölf's picture

    Author: Carlo Maria Zwölf

    Date: 26 Feb, 2019

    Dear Matt, all,
    The initiative « Group of European Experts in RDA » produced a document where the question DOIs / URIs / Other? is discussed, together with other key issues on assigning Persistent Identifiers: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1116189
    All the best,
    Carlo.

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