A further consideration would also be "who are the users?"
For example, I would hope that publications would start to cite biodiversity objects (specimens, taxon names, sequences) in the same way that they cite papers. This requires an identifier (and services) that can be easily embedded into both author and publisher workflows so that they become second nature (in the way the LSIDs with UUIDs attached pretty much don't).
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 "registration of scientific primary and secondary data" at the cost of 250€ per prefix (which allows you to create as many DOIs as you like).
http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/registration_agencies.html#8.2 http://www.doi.org/registration_agencies.html
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. http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/registration_agencies.html#8.8
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
Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
This message is sent on a personal basis and does not constitute an activity of the German Federal Government or its research institutions. Together with any attachments, this message is intended for the addressee(s) only and may not be redistributed without permission. _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
Roger Hyam Roger@BiodiversityCollectionsIndex.org http://www.BiodiversityCollectionsIndex.org
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 20A Inverleith Row, Edinburgh, EH3 5LR, UK Tel: +44 131 552 7171 ext 3015 Fax: +44 131 248 2901 http://www.rbge.org.uk/
tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy DEEB, FBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html