[tdwg-tag] Are DOIs expensive?

Gregor Hagedorn g.m.hagedorn at gmail.com
Wed Nov 26 12:02:25 CET 2008


On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Roger Hyam <rogerhyam at mac.com> wrote:
> If they stop working in 10 years do we get our €1,000 back or do we get
> actual compensation for injury caused because we have come to rely on them
> and now we have to find some other mechanism? Do they have a clause where
> they can come to us and ask for more money if they need it? Boy they would
> be in a good position to do so once we totally rely on them!

I am not sure that is relevant, since the DOI or handle will remain a
neutral and permanent identifier in the way Dave V has specified,
which can be resolved in multiple ways. The services that can
potentially go down are resolution, not existance of an identifier.
Should dois fail, would anyone sane try to ruthlessly reuse the
identifier space in which a few million "historical" digital objects
have been recorded?

There are advantages of coupling it into the existing doi system for
resolution, one of the advantages being that it is well known and much
more likely to be picked up by NCBI, EMBL, and Journal editors
(outside of biodiv itself) than a homegrown system. Other advantages
have been described by the funcationalities Roderic described.

Your comments, Roger, are they not really referring to ONE resolution
method, where there could be others? Is it dangerous should the whole
of DOI go down (unlikely) and we need to step in in 10 years? Is a few
1000 EUR is not a bad price for ten years or service?

Maybe I misunderstand something.

Gregor



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