I think we're missing part of the point about DOIs, or at least, what makes them cool. It's the services underlying them (e.g., CrossRef).
If we don't want/need the services, then we can just use Handles (essentially for free). DOIs issued by agencies such as the German TIB are little more than Handles. For example, doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.548746 can be resolved using
http://dx.doi.org/, but there is no associated metadata in CrossRef. So, I can't do much with the identifier other than resolve it.
If we go the Handle/cheap DOI route we get an infrastructure to handle stable identifiers (PURL would be another route), but little else. This would be useful if, for example, we managed a resolver where people could report failures to resolve identifiers (I do this all the time for CrossRef DOIs).
Re granularity, apparently LANL has some 600 million Handles, which beats us (for now, at least).
Here's what I think we should aim for:
1. Identifiers that can be easily resolved, reasonably independent of current technology, and come with a service to report failures of resolution.
2. Services that can take an identifier and return metadata about the object identified
3. Services that can return identifiers from object metadata.
If we do this, we have CrossRef for biodiversity (enabling, for example, citation networks between data to be constructed). Why aren't we aiming for this?
Regards
Rod
On 25 Nov 2008, at 11:50, Roger Hyam wrote:
My thought is that the German TIB does not expect 'publishers' to have millions of digital assets. There is an issue with the granularity of our data compared with that of the publishing industry that would call for a different business model for a central register.
What happens if the maintenance fee is not paid? Do the identifiers cease to be permanent? There are many things in life that are permanent if you keep paying the bills our problem is paying the bills.
<half-joke>
As a community we could run a central register for GUIDs. I'm currently free next year and would set one up but some one else would have to find the money to pay for me (and my successors/assistances) and the infrastructure .... indefinitely. The whole thing would have a significant set up cost and an on-going maintenance cost. It could be tuned to our needs and run at a much cheaper cost than DOIs but it would still cost real cash money. An endowment of say $10m (a secure income of $100k/year at current base rates) would secure the thing as a viable project provided we still got input from larger institutions on an ongoing basis.
</half-joke>
All the best,
Roger
On 25 Nov 2008, at 10:59, Markus Döring (GBIF) wrote:
That is very interesting, Gregor. Apparently it is up to the registration agency on how much they charge (and not the central DOI). There are currently 8 agencies for different areas with the German TIB issuing DOI prefixes for "r
egistration of scientific primary and secondary data" at the cost of 250€ per prefix (which allows you to create as many DOIs as you like).
It would also be possible to setup a new registration agency for biodiversity data if we feel this is more suited to our needs. There are several costs associated with this though, an annual membership fee ($35.000), a "franchise fee" for each newly registered name ($0.04/doi) and a maintenance fee ($0.005/doi). So this is clearly much more expensive and would be around 9 million dollars each year for 200 million occurrence records in GBIF.
So I guess this is what was investigated before and which is far too expensive. But it should be worth consulting the TIB registry, 250€ per publisher doesnt sound bad at all.
Markus
PS: I am expressing my personal thoughts in this conversation and not GBIFs official policy.
On Nov 25, 2008, at 6:26, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
I previously concurred with arguments against DOI on the basis of
cost. However, is this correct?
http://www.tib-hannover.de/en/the-tib/doi-registration-agency/ states
a yearly fee of 250 EUR for the publisher, not a per-object fee. That
is considerably less than the Total Cost of Ownership of running
custom-designed LSID software. DOI is well established and many people
already know that it can be looked up on the web ...
Gregor
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