When DOIs collide and then disappear: when is a unique, resolvable identifier a bad idea?

As much as I like the idea of a globally unique, resolvable identifier, my recent experience with JSTOR is making me wonder.

JSTOR has three identifiers for articles it archives, DOIs, SICIs, and stable URLs (the later being introduced with the new platform released April 4, 2008). Previously JSTOR would publish DOIs for many of its articles. However, not all of these work, and many are now embedded in the HTML (say, in Dublin Core meta elements) but not publicly displayed.

I suspect the issue is the moving wall:

Journals in JSTOR have "moving walls" that define the time lag between the most current issue published and the content available in JSTOR. The majority of journals in the archive have moving walls of between 3 and 5 years, but publishers may elect walls anywhere from zero to 10 years.

Now, imagine that a publisher has an article on its web site, complete with a DOI, and that article is then add to JSTOR, but is still displayed on the publisher's site.


To make this concrete, consider the article by Baum et al. . On the InformaWorld site this is displayed with doi:10.1080/106351598260879. The same article is also in JSTOR, with the URL http://www.jstor.org/pss/2585367. No DOI is displayed on the page, but if you look at the HTML source, we find:
<meta name="dc.Identifier" scheme="doi" content="10.2307/2585367">. The DOI prefix 10.2307 is used for all JSTOR DOIs, and some for Systematic Biology still work, e.g. 10.2307/2413524.

Now, what happens when the JSTOR moving wall overlaps with publisher's material? What happens if a publisher digitises back issues, then assigns them DOIs? Do the JSOR DOIs then die (as some of them seem to have already done)? And what happens to the poor sap like me, who has been linking to JSTOR DOIs in the naive belief that DOIs don't die?

Suddenly separating identity from resolution is starting to look very attractive...

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Universal Serial Item Names

Following on from the discussion of BHL and DOIs, I stumbled across some remarkable work by Robert Cameron at SFU. Cameron has developed Universal Serial Item Names (USIN). The approach is spelled out in detail in Towards Universal Serial Item Names (also on Scribd). This lengthy document deals with how to develop user-friendly identifiers for journal articles, books, and other documents. The solution looks less baroque than SICIs, which I've discussed earlier.

There is also a web site (USIN.org), complete with examples and source code. Identifiers for books are straightforward, for instance bibp:ISBN/0-86542-889-1 identifies a certain book:

For journals things are slightly more complicated. However, Cameron simplified things a little in his subsequent paper Scholar-Friendly DOI Suffixes with JACC: Journal Article Citation Convention (also on Scribd).

JACC (Journal Article Citation Convention) is proposed as an alternative to SICI (Serial Item and Contribution Identifier) as a convention for specifying journal articles in DOI (Digital Object Identifier) suffixes. JACC is intended to provide a very simple tool for scholars to easily create Web links to DOIs and to also support interoperability between legacy article citation systems and DOI-based services. The simplicity of JACC in comparison to SICI should be a boon both to the scholar and to the implementor of DOI responders.

USIN and JACC use the minimal number of elements in order to identifier an article, such as journal code (e.g., ISSN or an accepted acronym), volume number, and starting page. Using ISSNs ensures globally unique identifiers for journals, but the scheme can also use acronyms, hence those journals that lack ISSNs could be catered for. The scheme is simple, and in many cases will provide the bare minimum of information necessary to locate an item via an OpenURL resolver. Indeed, one simple way to implement USIN identifiers would be to have a service that takes URIs of the form <journal-code>:<volume>@<page> and resolves them behind the scenes using OpenURL. Hence we get simple identifiers that are resolvable, without the baroque approach of SICIs.

When I get the chance I may add support for something like this to bioGUID.

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