---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: ! 'DOIs: What you need to know'

excerpt: Sparked off by a comment on Document Object Identifiers and metrics by Ernesto
  Priego, I wrote up a brief proposal for the tech side of what I perceived as the
  function of DOIs. It turns out, there's a great deal more to it.
wordpress_id: 1889
wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/2012/02/03/dois-what-you-need-to-know/
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categories:
- Technology
- Open Access
- Academia
tags:
- Open Access
- Publishing
- DOI
comments:
- id: 6621
  author: Dr Ernesto Priego
  author_email: ''
  author_url: http://twitter.com/ernestopriego
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  content: ! 'This is exciting in a number of levels. I still need to find the time,
    mental space and concentration to write a longer piece about what made me tweet
    that. I was not aware of the options offered by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers
    Association (thanks to Geoffrey Bilder for getting in touch and sharing this!).
    Though I did and still think the membership fee is a deterrent for wider and more
    open use, the context in which I called for measuring "democratic URLs" had more
    to do with a different situation.


    I tweeted it in the context of so much talk (well, basically a lot of RTs to a
    Chronicle piece by Jen Howard) about "altmetrics". My own personal research has
    focused in a double movement, one, engaging in academic-scholarly activity on
    Twitter through link sharing and discussion (such as the one that inspired these
    posts of yours). This means I am personally convinced social media is an effective
    way of conducting scholarship. The second movement though deals with tracking
    how many people (and importantly, what people where and if possible why) click
    on the links shared. My comment about DOIs has to do with my theoretical and practical
    resistance to what has been phrased as "tracking mentions of scholarly works on
    social media sites". Obviously it''s not that I oppose to this tracking. I just
    want to see more discussion about how this tracking is done, what "mentions" really
    means. There''s at least two main projects using the same terms, and though I
    find them fascinating, worthy of praise as projects and tools, potentially very
    useful etc., I am concerned about the emphasis on tracking linkage to DOIs on
    social media sites like Twitter. For most DOIs, the result is zero. 0. At least
    in the digital humanities communities I follow, sharing of DOIs on Twitter is
    essentially null. My own limited, personal research of my own social media activity
    shows that people may retweet tweets with links, but the percentage of colleagues
    clicking on those links is minimal. A lot of scholars are tweeting from their
    mobile phones, not their desktops, and often won''t click on a link because it
    will take ages to load or they don''t have the time to read when they are tweeting
    (they are doing it on the train, you see, or under the table on a boring meeting).
    So why is the main form of tracking "impact" of scholarly work on social media
    sites the DOI, when research still has to prove a considerable number of scholars
    are sharing them on sites like Twitter? Why would an external service like Topsy
    be used to determine what "influential" twitterers have tweeted a DOI, when hardly
    anyone is doing it? Shouldn''t we be measuring who is sharing *any academic links*
    at all on social media sites (something like what the Statistical Cybermetrics
    group in Wolverhampton do, but specifically about social media --and hey, just
    Twitter-- and for all types of resources, not only DOIs or university sites),
    instead of suddenly wanting to quantify what is really not yet happening yet?
    What happens --even if results are taken with several grains of salt and all the
    fair warnings are taken into account-- when scholars start seeing that their DOIs
    have had no "impact" at all according to these metics? Will it make people who
    didn''t use to before start sharing like mad? And if they do, will people click
    on them? And if they are closed resources from subscription-only journals, how
    are those clicks on links to unread/unused resources be counted?As you can see,
    a lot still to be said. Apologies for the lengthy comment! Thanks for offering
    the space to discuss, Martin. '
---
<p>Sparked off by a comment on Document Object Identifiers and metrics by Ernesto Priego, I wrote up a brief proposal for the tech side of what I perceived as the function of DOIs. It turns out, there's a great deal more to it.</p>
<p>http://storify.com/martin_eve/dois-what-you-need-to-know</p>
<p><i>Featured image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/biblioteekje/">biblioteekje</a> under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.</i></p>