I’ve been encouraged to ask my stupid question at today’s session in PIDapalooza, so here I go!
My question is about the relationship between DOIs and landing pages for the content (i.e. resolution URLs).
In speaking with colleagues (who are NOT in the PID/metadata world but rather working in communications) in my organization about how to present our resources on the website, they would like to establish landing pages that serves as a “shell” or “package” that contain all related elements and derivatives of a specific title e.g. full publication, executive summary, related infographic, etc. Crossref doesn’t seem to recognize such “collections” or “packages” (or whatever you want to call them) as content types that can be assigned their own DOIs.
I see Crossref enables Multiple Resolution and Co-Access, so that one DOI had “point to” content in multiple locations. (That’s how I read it.) So, while a 1:1 relationship between the DOI and content/landing page is probably most common and best practice, a 1:multiple relationship is also possible. But what about the inverse, where multiple DOIs for different but related content resolve to one landing page where the “collection” is hosted?
Has anyone else encountered this problem, or found a way to resolve it?
Although our content is currently on a Drupal-based system, we are thinking of migrating to DSpace or Invenio. Perhaps there are repositories out there that have an elegant solution for this?
It’s getting to the end of a long two days so I’m beginning to feel a bit delirious, I hope my question makes sense.
The landing page for a DOI describes the resource identified and provides a way to get it.
DOIs can refer to multiple manifestations of a work. It’s OK to have the landing page link to, i.e.: an executive summary and a PDF of the same work.
As an example, IEEE DOIs typically resolve to a landing page on IEEE Xplore. That landing page may present the HTML version of the article as well as provide a link to the PDF like so:
We don’t register separate DOIs for the HTML version and the PDF version because they are the same work.
If you have different DOIs assigned to derivatives of a work and you want a way to refer to them collectively, you are correct in that there is no support for a generic, top-level container.
Posted content is the most semantically vague, but it would still be a kludge.
Aggregations of arbitrary resources are not well supported by DOIs as implemented.
Projects like the Open Archives Initiative’s “Object Reuse and Exchange” project [1] and later RMap [2] attempted to address this deficiency. It would be nice to see the ideas resurrected (disclaimer: I worked on RMap).
Multiple resolution for the DOIs would not be the right choice.
Maybe this is addressed in the new schema Crossref is working on. Their support is very responsive, friendly and knowledgable, so I’d run your situation by them.
