A question recently came up about whether any organizations (e.g. funders) assign DOIs to the accepted manuscript version of an article (after peer-review) that they host in their repositories. This would be a different DOI than the publisher assigned DOI to the final published version, but you could use related identifiers to show the relationship. I understand some organizations are assigning DOIs to preprints, which I think is a different case than the accepted manuscript.
I was wondering if the community has any insights or best practices. I’d appreciate understanding how other organizations think about this. Thanks!
Thanks Carly - am tagging a few people here who might have thoughts on this and will also post on twitter @Jonathan_DOI@Rachael@adamvialsmoore - thanks for any advice you can give on this!
With the new national funder policy mirroring Plan S we’ve given a lot of thought to PIDs for AAM
In fact there’s a paper from OR2021 here:
At the moment I think (datacite v4.4 schema) DOI for AAM is the most pragmatic solution
Lots of reasons for this - most important being repository control and ease of access followed by connecting related works via event or metadata updates (work in progress)
Thank you very much for sharing @adamvialsmoore! It was extremely helpful to read your presentation summary. You talk about an option for repositories to assign DOIs to AAMs. Have you seen this happen in practice? I’d be interested in talking to folks about their decision to do so.
Thanks, @Gin! That is wonderful to know about! The NISO works seems like it will help answer these questions and provide recommendations around what versions should have separate DOIs - pre-prints, AAMs, VORs, etc.
@alicemeadows or @Gin - Do you happen to know when the group might have an update or revised recommendations?
Oh the irony that I didn’t think of that!!
I’ve checked with Nettie (Lagace) who runs our standards program - the JAV working group is just getting going and right now they expect to take about a year to develop their recommendations. They’re also planning to survey the community as part of their work, so look out for more on that.
Thanks!
This is a complex topic which was discussed endlessly in the early days of Crossref (and may well still be being discussed). The key thing is to be clear about the semantics of the object you are referencing with the DOI, and the purpose for which you are referencing it.
Also, not all DOIs are equal, and the different DOI Registration Agencies (RAs) have different policies and views on this. I think where Crossref ended up is that if one version of the content is different enough from another than it would matter in a citation which one was being referenced, then it should have a different DOI. In general, it is accepted that preprints are likely to have material differences from final published articles, but differences between AAMs and VoRs are more likely to be related to formatting rather than meaning. However, this likely depends on the policy of any given publisher.
This old blog post on the topic is still interesting to read,
One thing I think it is generally agreed upon - it’s not a good idea to assign multiple PIDs to the same object just because it happens to reside in multiple locations - is this just creates complexity with both referencing and finding an object. There are better mechanisms to deal with this, such as DOI Multiple Resolution. This would imply the need to coordinate among repositories if several hosted copies of the same AAM.
I’d be interested to hear from any of the DOI RAs on their current thinking on this topic.
Thanks, @CShillum! It’s very helpful to hear more about how Crossref has thought through this. Apologies for the delayed response. I somehow missed your response until now.
