An Electronic Publishing Control Tool: DOI System

The background of the DOI system is due to the widespread popularity of the network. Many publishers began to engage in web publishing. However, from the perspective of the copyright owner, electronic data can be freely distributed to a large audience, either with or without authorization. This phenomenon of piracy has become commonplace in software and musical works, thus causing the original copyright owners to suffer major economic losses.

From the perspective of Internet users, the emergence of the Internet not only facilitates people's communication and seeking information, but also brings confusion to the search for information. Online content is not only difficult to find, but can be found, but the object being sought no longer exists. At present, some search engines have a large number of such problems when searching literature. Part of the reason for this situation is due to the huge capacity of the Internet.

The structure of the DOI system Due to these reasons, the American Association of Publishers (AAP) established the "Technical Implementation Committee" in 1994 to design a system that can protect intellectual property rights and realize the commercial interests of copyright holders. It was decided to first introduce an industry-standard e-publishing content identifier to support the mutual conversion of various systems between publishers and users, and to provide the basis for the coordinated management of copyright and usage rights. The system is based on the “processing system” developed by the National Research and Innovation Federation (CNRI) as a supporting technology to provide long-lasting and reliable identifiers for digitized publications. This system debuted at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997 and continued to be exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1998, drawing the attention of the publishing community.

The full name of the DOI is Digital Objects Identifer, which means a digitized object identifier. It is a set of strings consisting of numbers, letters, or other symbols. Including the prefix and the suffix, the middle is distinguished by a slash. The prefix is ​​specified by the identifier management agency and the suffix is ​​assigned by the publishing agency itself.

The prefix consists of two parts, separated by a dot. The first part has two characters that represent which name management authority the DOI is assigned to. Since there is only one identifier management mechanism at present, it is always 1, 0 and two digits. In the future, there may be more than one management organization, such as one country or one industry (such as publishing, photography, music, software, etc.). The second part of the prefix represents the publication of the DOI prefix that is assigned to use it, or is registered with the identity management authority, and is the copyright of any object to be controlled for digitization.

The suffix is ​​given by the publisher or the copyright owner and is a unique set of characters used to represent a particular digitized object. Many publishers use existing identification symbols as suffixes, such as ISBN, ISSN, etc. Try two examples:
1 10·1000/1
2 10·1016/SO 921877797000232
Example 1 is the homepage identifier of the DOI system on the Web. The prefix is ​​10.1000 and the suffix is ​​1.
Example 2 is the identifier of an article in a magazine of the Elsevier Science Society. The suffix used is the publisher's item identifier (PII).

Operational Principles of the DOI System Existing identifiers such as ISBN and ISSN are used in paper media publications and cannot provide various identification and trade requirements in the electronic environment. The DOI system is dedicated to identifying digital data. In brief, the principle is: when a digitized object is generated or before it is generated, it is pasted with a unique and persistent identifier to provide a label for the entire lifetime of the digitized object, and with the digitized object. The specific location has nothing to do.

The so-called digitized objects are any machine-readable documents that have addressable, computer-readable names. Including computer level, digitized all documents, digital audio, digital images or video, or other digitized data.

The ideal realm of DOI system operation is: DOI will be part of the data described by the digitized object and always coexist with the digital object. A DOI record, together with information on the specific location of the digitized object, is sent to the DOI central server for registration and storage. This centrally stored data forms a data discrimination library. Use a database of special software to link, or resolve a DOI, to associate it with the location of its associated digitized object. When the user looks for a digitized object. Or the information about this object, the DOI query will be transmitted to the DOI server, which finds the DOI's record and the address of the object it is related to, links the two together, and positions them (mostly URLs). Return to the user's browser. The browser then retrieves the two objects or information about the object itself and displays the result to the user. The process is as fast as finding URLs, but it increases the chance of retrieving digitized objects that frequently change URLs.

Management of the DOI system The current DOI system is managed by the non-profit international DOI Foundation and is regulated by a board of directors. Members of the board of directors are representatives of major publishers, including companies such as Microsoft, Elsevier, John Wiley & Son, and representatives of associations established to promote the interests of publishers, such as AAP, author licensing and copyright associations in the UK, and interdisciplinary science Technical and Medical Publishers Association. Each of these organizations provides 100,000 to 300,000 U.S. dollars in membership fees each year.

When the publisher registers the DOI prefix with the Foundation, it currently costs about US$1,000. A publisher can either register a prefix or register different prefixes for different subsidiaries.

When the DOI system was established, the Foundation hopes to manage and operate through good organization and strict rules. Therefore, at the beginning of the period, only some large or reputable publishing organizations are allowed to allocate to DOI. And in the rules, various requirements for participating in this system were formulated to maintain the accuracy and validity of links with specialized URLs.

When a publisher transfers or sells its product's copyright, that is, the location of a digitized object has changed, the publisher should send this object change information to the DOI server, the server will be automatically updated, and the central server will Keep data intact.

DOI System Evaluation The DOI system provides publishers with a tool that can be used both for internal management of publications and for digital business. It provides the basis for automated management of electronic publishing daily trading procedures such as document retrieval, bill exchange, and publication licensing.

In the rapidly changing electronic publishing world, the position of electronic documents changes frequently due to changes in the owner of information, and a technology needs to be provided to ensure that although the time and place of publication of the linked copyright owner has changed, its identifier has changed. Still maintain a kind of persistence. In this regard, the DOI system provides a way to identify the relevant information for the reader or user. Because DOI is applicable to all forms of knowledge content, it can be used to key and retrieve various forms related to articles, books, classroom experiments, digital videos, audio data, and electronic documents. The DOI system's ability to keep track of the current address of a document allows users to link from a publisher’s product, such as a bibliographic database or article citation, to another publisher’s abstract or full text of this digital object, especially It is especially useful for documents that are converted back and forth between servers, new versions of software, digital music compositions in different document formats, or scientific articles that have been modified or augmented.

However, although the DOI system has some advantages, it is not a perfect system from the perspective of the academic world. Its main problems are:

1. It failed to provide a stable, reliable, affordable standard system that everyone could use. The DOI system is very helpful for big publishers. They can support their commercial communication on the Internet and protect their intellectual copyright. However, the products produced by these publishers only make up part of all the information available on the Internet. In addition, before the introduction of the DOI system. Their data has been relatively stable and has been well controlled.

This means that most of the members who are published in the same do not directly participate in the DOI system. Since the stability of URLs and the lack of sustainability of publications on the Internet stem from other publishers, this indicates that the chaos of online publishing will still not be effectively controlled.

2. The DOI system provides a reliable way of persistently identifying various publishers' online publishing objects, but if most non-regular publishing organizations are also allowed to join the DOI system, the system may accumulate a lot of non-existent The identifier of the object caused the crash. But on the other hand. If non-regular publishers are not allowed to participate in the DOI system, they may be forced to establish a similar system with the same persistence and manage the systems themselves to ensure quality. But not all types of publishers can afford time and money to run a complex system like DOI that requires constant information updates. However, the information on the Internet is based on the information provided by these agencies.

3. DOI created a system for publishers. It can protect publishers from abuse of digital data and suffer serious economic losses, and it can continue to benefit the use of public welfare agencies. However, DOI may hinder the public access to online publications by users, especially for commercial publications. Because readers of the DOI query, unless authorized to retrieve, most of the obtained may only be a list of various publications. Instead of directly queried publications. If end users discover that DOI is an obstacle to accessing academic information. They may be inclined to look for sources of informal literature, such as the increasing number of preprinted documents that are currently appearing.