Now I am become DOI, destroyer of gatekeeping worlds
Rules against citing DOI-less content are easier to understand once you understand a bit more about life within an academic publishing house.<p>An article with a DOI has more longevity. This is mentioned in the post, but I don&#x27;t think the author fully grasps the importance of this. Plain URLs break down all the damn time; publishers&#x2F;journals redesign their sites and migrate between technology partners often. It only takes a few Very Important People to flip out about a missing piece of data or a broken link before a publisher will start to put safeguards into the production workflow to prevent such complaints. Mandating DOIs alongside citations is an easy policy toward that goal. An article with a DOI will almost surely be supported by a technology back-end that can keep that DOI up-to-date, generate manifests for (C)LOCKSS, submit materials to archival services like Portico, etc.<p>DOI-bound citations are much more efficient throughout the publishing process. Editors can use DOIs to quickly verify and proof citations. If a publisher&#x27;s workflow requires sending papers to an XML composition vendor for tagging, DOIs can make that process more automated and accurate. Some of the more sophisticated XML vendors can generate all the citations given only the DOIs. This might not sounds like much, but it&#x27;s notoriously easy to make mistakes on citations throughout the editorial process, even with NLP and other more enlightened software in the mix. If you ever see an article with a citation list like this...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2004...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2006a...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2006b...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2006d...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2006f...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2006g...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2007...<p>* Suzuki, et al. 2008b...<p>...think about all the double&#x2F;triple&#x2F;quadruple checking bullshit that goes into making sure all the text and links in that list are accurate, and know that DOIs take most of that headache away. It&#x27;s substantially more efficient at scale when DOIs are included.<p>Recently I&#x27;ve been thinking about how some of these problems could potentially be solved via new ideas like IPFS. A Handle-based system like DOI might not be as necessary in IPFS (given IPNS), and perhaps you could start creating and citing more diverse sources of content with some confidence in preservation&#x2F;longevity. It could be a great fit for open access content.