JSTOR and DOI
I am aware this will have little interest for most readers, but it looks like JSTOR is finally going to be enabling DOI for journals that wish to have their content identifiable in this way. This is very good news. JSTOR is easily the best online database for academic journals. It is beautifully designed, has all of the top journals, and is constantly being updated with new features that are both useful and well integrated with their service. It is a model of how to handle online content. Except, that is—until now—for the way the content could be identified and shared. Formerly JSTOR had their own URI scheme, and it was ugly. Very ugly. For example, suppose I wanted to send you to Eli Hirsch’s paper “Rules for a Good Language” from the Journal of Philosophy (1988). Formerly I would have had to provide you with this extremely ugly URI:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%28198812%2985
%3A12%3C694%3ARFAGL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
I had to manually split that over two lines, it is so unwieldy. And not only is this ugly, but it is proprietary. With the introduction of DOI however I can now provide you with this elegant URI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2026729
This has the advantages of economy and conformance to an open standard. It achieves the first by not trying to encode content information into the URI, as in the JSTOR scheme. It achieves the second simply by being registered through the DOI service. This means that if the Journal of Philosophy wanted to switch from JSTOR to another provider, it could update the DOI information so that the Hirsch link would pass you through to the new provider. It is clearly in the interests of all journals to adopt this scheme to enable a degree of independence from their online providers, and I assume it will only be a matter of time before all JSTOR journals provide DOI for their articles. (Perhaps this is the reason I stumbled across this news by accident rather than seeing it on the JSTOR announcement list). For now this is so new that, unusually enough, you can only see the DOI information for articles when you link to them from outside a zone where you are authorised to access them—if I look at the Hirsch article from my university network I do not see the DOI information, while if I look at it from this café I can.
Next, we can hope that The Journal of Philosophy will enable DOI for the articles it has online on its own website.