University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![](http://www.jstor.org/templates/jsp/_jstor/images/jstor_logo.gif){align="right"}  
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](http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/)) but not publicly
displayed.  
  
I suspect the issue is the [moving
wall](http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/journals/movingWall.jsp):  

> 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.  
  
![](http://www.jstor.org/covergifs/systbiol/cover.gif){align="left"
hspace="7"}  
To make this concrete, consider the article by Baum *et al.* . On the
InformaWorld site this is displayed with
[doi:10.1080/106351598260879](http://dx.doi.org/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:  

. The DOI prefix **10.2307** is used for all JSTOR DOIs, and some for
Systematic Biology still work, e.g.
[10.2307/2413524](http://dx.doi.org/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\...  
  


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.

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

Following on from the discussion of [BHL and
DOIs](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/10/bhl-and-dois.html), 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](http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-12/10) (also on
[Scribd](http://www.scribd.com/doc/432360/Toward-Universal-Serial-Item-Names)).
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](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/06/making-taxonomic-literature-online.html).  
  
There is also a web site ([USIN.org](http://usin.org)), complete with
examples and source code. Identifiers for books are straightforward, for
instance
[bibp:ISBN/0-86542-889-1](http://usin.org/bibp1.0/resolve?usin=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](ftp://fas.sfu.ca/pub/cs/TR/1998/CMPT1998-08.html) (also on
[Scribd](http://www.scribd.com/doc/432354/ScholarFriendly-DOI-Suffixes-with-JACC-Journal-Article-Citation-Convention)).  

> 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 :@ 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](http://bioguid.info).


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.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

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

Universal Serial Item Names