Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Duplicate DOIs

I think this isn't supposed to happen, but here's a paper with two DOIs.

The first DOI is doi:10.1651/0278-0372(1997)17[253:MPAOTC]2.0.CO;2, which links to a record served by BIOONE. The second is doi:10.2307/1549275, which links to a JSTOR record (sici:0278-0372(199705)17:2<253:MPAOTC>2.0.CO;2-O).

The paper is:
Morphology-Based Phylogenetic Analysis of the Clawed Lobsters (Family Nephropidae and the New Family Chilenophoberidae)
Dale Tshudy, Loren E. Babcock
Journal of Crustacean Biology, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 253-263


Now, the digital versions served by BIOONE and JSTOR is different, in that BIOONE serves full text HTML and a PDF, whereas JSTOR serves scanned images, but this is the same article.

As an added "feature", the BIOONE DOI doesn't work, which in my experience is often the case with BIOONE DOIs.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

DOIs that don't work seem to me a much bigger problem than DOIs that refer to different copies of the same paper. Because I thought the whole point of DOIs was that they were supposed to work more reliably and permanently than URLs.

Roderic Page said...

Well, yes, DOIs are meant to be persistent. However, technology alone can't guarantee this. What seems to happen is that somebody, somewhere, screws up. Some providers seem more prone to this than others. BioOne and InformaWorld seem particulary bad, in my experience.

Anonymous said...

Professor Page, thank you very much for bringing this issue to our attention. Our technical staff have done a bit of investigation to identify the problem.

After querying the CrossRef system, we have verified that some of the identifiers that BioOne has posted with articles for this title are not currently registered DOIs, though they are labeled as such on the BioOne web site. BioOne may have plans to register the DOIs for these other titles at a later date. In this case, an attempt to register a DOI for an already registered title would initiate a conflict report to JSTOR. In that situation, we would work with the publisher to determine the appropriate primary version of the article.

In the meantime, we will pursue this issue with the Crossref Technical Working Group, and will encourage correction of this problem on the BioOne site. Please feel free to contact me at any time if you have further questions.

Kristen Garlock
JSTOR User Services
support@jstor.org

Roderic Page said...

Thanks for following this up Kirsten. I think the CrossRef system is really useful, and I'm trying to interest the biodiverisity informatics community in DOIs, so I get a bit stroppy when they break.