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The
Informal Persistent Locator, an Alternative to DOI |
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THE
INFORMAL PERSISTENT LOCATOR, For those without the
funds or the energy to participate in the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) program,
such as those operating or contributing to mon-and-pop electronic journals,
it is possible to use an Informal Persistent Locator (IPL) to track each
individual papers (say, HTML or PDF), that is, other than the ISSN or ISBN
numbers for entire journals or books. The IPL is an alphanumeric
code that you yourself generate randomly or pseudorandomly that is long
enough not to be duplicated within a reasonable time frame by other randomly
generated strings of similar length. Tack it on your article with the
abstract, then ask for it to be cited with your paper in bibliographies, and
others should always be able to find copies anywhere they may be on the Web. One might use any string
of numbers and letters, but a set of three five alphanumeric strings seems
neat. For example, I used Randset http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/ResBot/Phyl/Rand/Randset.htm
to generate a pseudorandom
string of 15 digits, 258980968144459, then added hyphens. IPL: 25898-09681-44459 Any alphabetic string
whatever may be used, of reasonable length and avoiding digits and letters
that may be confused (0 and O, 1 and l, 6 and b, etc.). This results in a poor
man's DOI, working solely as locator, unattached to any special bibliographic
infrastructure of metadata beyond Web spidering. Even if someone duplicates
your IPL, then a Web search on the IPL will obtain only two PDFs to select
from. See also: http://www.doi.org/ DOI home page and entries on DOIs,
handles, PURLs, GUIDs, etc. in Wikipedia. For example: “Please cite
the IPL whenever this paper is given in bibliographies IPL: 25898-09681-44459, in
absence of a DOI.” |
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