How to get a DOI for your blog posts

40 points by eBPF

mro

reading Terence is always enjoyable, but what does a doi what a cool uri doesn't? https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

sunshowers

A blog post of mine got cited in an academic paper recently, and it would definitely have been nice to have a DOI for it!
edent

Thank you :-)

While I hope my URls remain cool forever - at some point I'll forget to renew my domain, or will suffer catastrophic data loss, or .mobi will be price-jacked by its new owners, or whatever.

This way, I hope, a trustworthy external party could redirect doi.org/10.123/123 to newsite.example/archive/whatever.html
legoktm
I primarily interact with and prefer DOIs when I'm adding references to Wikipedia articles. A few things:
- The DOI takes me to the "canonical" website for a source instead of me needing to figure out which version of a paper is the preferred one (preprints, PDF on the author's website, the journal's website, etc.)
- I don't trust most publishers to actually have cool URIs! DOIs can be repaired without effort on Wikipedia's/my part.
- The citation metadata is usually already machine readable/in some database so I don't need to type it in manually.
See also Wikipedia's internal guidance on Why use DOI.
- k749gtnc9l3w
  
  the "canonical" website for a source instead of me needing to figure out which version of a paper is the preferred one
  
  Note that the canonical source and the preferred source are still often different, up to the «canonical» source for the purposes of bibliometry referring to the full version (typically on a preprint server) for some of the details!
k749gtnc9l3w

Signaling the intent to be the primary key for disambiguation. Especially in the world where TLDs can't be trusted with being consistent…
ploum

Also curious about this

fanf

What happens when a DOI publisher stops paying their subscription fees?

(I’m dubious about DOI’s part in the academic publishing rent-seeker system that creams off research funding into private profit, but on the other hand the DNS is entirely funded by rents, but on the gripping hand DOI is orders of magnitude more expensive than DNS…)

elephantium

on the gripping hand

As the Moties would say.

tuxes

Very cool!

It feels a bit self-indulgent and a little pretentious to mint a new DOI for every previous and future post on this site. But it isn't like the DOI system is running out of space, is it?

This feels like those people with their own Autonomous System.

This is all good. It might be a different situation if wordpress.org enabled it, but that's not what's happening here.

addison

Nice. I've been cited a few times as well so I might start doing this.