University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

As part of a project to map taxonomic citations to bibliographic
identifiers I\'m tackling strings like this (from the ION record
[urn:lsid:organismnames.com:name:1405511](http://www.organismnames.com/lsidmetadata.htm?lsid=1405511)
for *Pseudomyrmex crudelis*):  
  
  
Systematics, biogeography and host plant associations of the
Pseudomyrmex viduus group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Triplaris- and
Tachigali-inhabiting ants. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society,
126(4), August 1999: 451-540. 516 \[Zoological Record Volume 136\]  
  
  
I parse the string into its components (e.g., journal, volume, issue,
pagination) and use scripts to locate identifiers such as DOIs. I regard
DOIs as the gold standard for bibliographic identifiers. The are
(usually) unique, and CrossRef provides some really useful services to
support them (DOIs now also [support linked
data](http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2011/04/content_negotiation_for_crossr.html)
if you are in to that sort of thing). Occasionally there are problems,
such as duplicate DOIs when [material moves from a publisher\'s site to,
say, JSTOR](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/05/duplicate-dois.html). And
some publishers are really, really bad at releasing DOIs that don\'t
resolve. For example, [Taylor & Francis
Online](http://www.tandfonline.com/) have at least 18,000 DOIs for the
*Annals and Magazine of Natural History* that don\'t resolve (e.g.,
[doi:10.1080/00222933809512318](http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00222933809512318)
for [this
paper](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00222933809512318)).  
  
Sometimes my automated scripts for finding DOIs fail and I have to
resort to Googling. To my surprise, I found two versions of the paper
\"Systematics, biogeography and host plant associations of the
Pseudomyrmex viduus group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Triplaris- and
Tachigali-inhabiting ants\", each with a different DOI:  
  

- [doi:10.1006/zjls.1998.0158](http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/zjls.1998.0158)
  at [Science
  Direct](http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0024408298901583)
- [doi:10.1111/j.1096-3642.1999.tb00157.x](http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1999.tb00157.x)
  at
  [Wiley](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1999.tb00157.x/abstract)

  
Now, this isn\'t supposed to happen. Interestingly, if you resolve
[doi:10.1006/zjls.1998.0158](http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/zjls.1998.0158),
either on the web or using CrossRef\'s OpenURL resolver, you get the
page/metadata for
[doi:10.1111/j.1096-3642.1999.tb00157.x](http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1999.tb00157.x).  
  
To see what was going on I fired up my local installation of Tony
Hammnd\'s [OpenHandle](http://code.google.com/p/openhandle/) tool (see
<http://bioguid.info/openhandle/>) and entered the Elsevier DOI
(10.1006/zjls.1998.0158) and got this:  
  

``` {style="font-size:10px;border:1px solid rgb(192,192,192);background-color:rgb(240,240,240);"}
{
    "comment" : "OpenHandle (JSON) - see http://code.google.com/p/openhandle/" ,
    "handle" : "hdl:10.1006/zjls.1998.0158" ,
    "handleStatus" : {
        "code" : "1" ,
        "message" : "SUCCESS"
    } ,
    "handleValues" : [
        {
            "index" : "100" ,
            "type" : "HS_ADMIN" ,
         "data" : {
                "adminRef" : "hdl:10.1006/zjls.1998.0158?index=100" ,
                "adminPermission" : "111111110111"
            } ,
            "permission" : "1110" ,
            "ttl" : "+86400" ,
            "timestamp" : "Thu Apr 13 19:09:03 BST 2000" ,
            "reference"  : []
        } ,
        {
            "index" : "1" ,
            "type" : "URL" ,
            "data" : "http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0024408298901583" ,
            "permission" : "1110" ,
            "ttl" : "+86400" ,
            "timestamp" : "Tue Aug 12 16:43:12 BST 2003" ,
            "reference"  : []
        } ,
        {
            "index" : "700050" ,
            "type" : "700050" ,
            "data" : "20030811104844000" ,
            "permission" : "1110" ,
            "ttl" : "+86400" ,
            "timestamp" : "Tue Aug 12 16:43:16 BST 2003" ,
            "reference"  : []
        } ,
        {
            "index" : "1970" ,
            "type" : "HS_ALIAS" ,
            "data" : "10.1111/j.1096-3642.1999.tb00157.x" ,
            "permission" : "1110" ,
            "ttl" : "+86400" ,
            "timestamp" : "Mon Aug 25 21:06:50 BST 2008" ,
            "reference"  : []
        }
    ]
}
```

  
The interesting bit is the \"HS_ALIAS\" at the bottom. I\'d not come
across this before, although it\'s in the spec ([RFC
3651](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3651.txt)) for all to see (yeah, but
who reads those?). The handle system that underlies DOIs has mechanism
to support aliases, so that a DOI that originally pointed to a web page
(say, for an article) can be redirected to point to another DOI. In this
case, the Elsevier DOI redirects to the Wiley DOI
(\"10.1111/j.1096-3642.1999.tb00157.x\" in the HS_ALIAS section), so the
user ends up at Wiley\'s page for this article, not Elsevier\'s. This
provides a way to accommodate changes in article ownership, without
requiring an existing publisher to reuse the previous publisher\'s
DOI.  
  
In one sense this seems to defeat the point of DOIs, namely that they
are effectively opaque identifiers that any publisher should be able to
host. Perhaps in this case the issue is that the DOI prefix (\"10.1006\"
and \"10.1111\" for Elsevier and Wiley, respectively) corresponds to a
publisher, and when something goes wrong with a DOI it\'s easier to
identify who is responsible based on this prefix, rather than the
individual DOI.  
  
In any event, next time I come across a duplicate DOI I\'ll need to
check whether it is an alias of another DOI before launching into
another rant about the (occasional) failings of DOIs.


As part of a project to map taxonomic citations to bibliographic identifiers I'm tackling strings like this (from the ION record urn:lsid:organismnames.com:name:1405511 for
<em>
 Pseudomyrmex crudelis
</em>
):  Systematics, biogeography and host plant associations of the Pseudomyrmex viduus group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Triplaris- and Tachigali-inhabiting ants. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 126(4), August 1999: 451-540.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Duplicate DOIs for the same article: alias DOIs, who knew?