PIDapalooza 2019

The European Commission-funded FREYA project (www.project-freya.eu) began in November 2017. It aims to extend the infrastructure for persistent identifiers to ensure that PIDs become a core component of open research in the European Union and around the world. This presentation will be delivered by a FREYA project representative from the British Library, and a FREYA Ambassador.

Section One (10 mins)
Community outreach is a vital part of the FREYA project. We need our material to make sense to librarians, policy-makers and researchers in disciplines ranging from nuclear physics to medieval history. In this section we’ll talk with you about our approach to community engagement, the evolution of the FREYA Knowledge Hub, our ambassador programme, and our quest for the perfect answer to that recurring question “what is a PID, and why should I care?”

Section Two (15 mins) "What are we DOIng about the out-of-copyright literature?"
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have revolutionised the way we locate, access, cite, share and track scholarly content. Every journal article that receives a DOI becomes part of a great linked network of research. Efforts are now being made to bring the historic literature, much of which is now online, into this linked network. However, as there are no rules or guidelines around registering DOIs for out-of-copyright content, this is raising serious issues around access.

Crossref’s Member Obligations<https://www.crossref.org/member-obligations/> state that “You must have the necessary rights for the content you register”. There is no mention of how members should proceed if there are no rights. This means that, under the current DOI system, anyone can assign a DOI to an out-of-copyright journal article, and there is nothing stopping them from putting “their” DOI’d version of that out-of-copyright article behind a paywall.

The major scholarly commercial publishers have now uploaded and assigned DOIs to thousands of out-of-copyright articles, many going back as far as the 1700s. If you want to access them, you need to pay (these include articles by Charles Darwin<https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8312.1862.tb01223.x> and Alfred Russell Wallace<https://doi.org/10.1080/00222935708680675>). In many cases, open access versions of this content exist on other websites (such as on the Biodiversity Heritage Library<https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/>), but anyone citing these articles must quote the DOI (as per their Crossref agreements) and thus point their readers to the versions behind paywalls.

There is no doubt that bringing this historic literature into the DOI system has made it infinitely more discoverable, citable and trackable, but at what cost?