Encryption & copyright
For several years, the International DOI Foundation has been working with book and with music publishers to come up with the equivalent of a universal product code for every work of art in digital form. Success is a slow process.
The problem is one common to both book and music publishing (See Business Week, July 23, 2001) -- the need to create a kind of catalog number that can instantly reference all kinds of information about a creative work in whatever form. The packaged-goods industry solved the problem years ago with Universal Product Codes (UPC), those things that show up on the bottom of cereal boxes and grocery items so the check-out scanners can find and computing pricing instantly. The invention of the UPC code, by the way, is credited by author Erwin Fletcher, writing on the website of the Cherokee County [Ala.] Post, to Norman J. Woodland, and commercialized by IBM. The adoption of the Universal Product Code, on April 3, 1973, transformed bar codes from a technological curiosity into a business juggernaut.
In print, many traditional directories, such as the Thomas Register, McGraw-Hill/Sweet's, and the Physicians Desk Reference, have developed electronic versions of their flagship print directories, but they haven't been hugely successful, writes Greenhouse Associates, an electronic information services and technology consultant (May, 2002).
An agency of the U.S. government, the National Information Standards Organization, defines what goes into a "digital object identifier". NISO calls the DOI Digital Object Identifier (DOI) "an identification system for intellectual property in the digital environment" which uniquely identifies content in all media, plus links users to rights holders with the aim of facilitating seamless e-commerce.
Scholarly journal publishers, in the print realm, are adopting the DOI standard. CrossRef a Burlington, Mass.-based a publisher collaborative that enables researchers to navigate online journals via DOI-based citation links, said in February that it has signed Hogrefe & Huber as its 100th Publisher member. This brings the total number of searchable journals in the CrossRef database to well over 5,000 with over 4 million registered journal articles.
What is a DOI? Here's what the DOI Foundation says on its website:
"The DOI is a system for interoperably identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment. A DOI assigned to content enhances a content producer's ability to trade electronically. It provides a framework for managing content in any form at any level of granularity, for linking customers with content suppliers, for facilitating electronic commerce, and enabling automated copyright management for all types of media.
The DOI Foundation says it is developing a prototype of advanced DOI functionality which will be completed by July 2002.
The Academic Press, a unit of Harcourt Science & Technology, has put up a web page describing its use of the DOI system for its scholarly journals.
David Sidman, CEO of Content Directions, Inc., a DOI Registration Agency, has written a thorough explanation of how DOI's could be broadly adopted beyond academic publishing.
"Unlike a URL, which breaks the moment a website’s sitemap is reorganized, or the item is moved to a different server, the DOI ensures permanent links, because if the URL for something changes, the owner of the object simply updates one central DOI record," says Sidman.
Prior to founding Content Directions Sidman was new-publishing technology director at academic publisher John Wiley & Sons. He was previously a technology strategist at Moody's Investors Services and at at a unit of Barclays Bank.
OTHER USEFUL LINKS:
1. Journal of Electronic Publishing, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997 article by Bill Rosenblatt on the DOI initiative:
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-02/doi.html
2.
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