DOI query
On 19/07/2022 20:32, Ivan Krylov wrote:
On Tue, 19 Jul 2022 16:53:53 +0000 "Koenker, Roger W" <rkoenker at illinois.edu> wrote:
I wondered if anyone had a suggestion for an alternative way to reference such things? And incidentally wondered whether DOI links were often this flaky.
Since this discussion does happen on R-package-devel from time to time, unfortunately, DOI links can be very flaky, but not for the same reasons. For example, see: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2022q2/008089.html (In my opinion, this is more of a package development question than an R development question and thus would be a better fit for <r-package-devel at r-project.org>.)
I wondered if anyone had a suggestion for an alternative way to reference such things?
I suppose you could only use the ISBN only, but most kinds of URLs you could use to link to your book can be expected to stop working sooner than the DOI. A link to a web.archive.org snapshot of the page should last relatively long, too. Could Zenodo link to the web page for your book (with a different DOI) while CUP figures out their availability problems?
I was led to believe that DOIs were like Platonic solids always there when you needed them.
There are two parts to DOI checks in R documentation. The one that usually fails is `R CMD check` not behaving enough like a human being with a browser and tripping anti-robot protection on a journal website. This happens so frequently that there's a separate sub-page on URL checks linked by the CRAN policy: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/URL_checks.html
Note that 'R CMD check' does not check URLs -- that is part of the CRAN-specific checking emulated with --as-cran.
The one that broke in your case is a publisher failing to keep their DOI link working. I knew this wasn't impossible, but have never seen an example until now. Unfortunately, I don't know whether CRAN would agree to make an exception for a DOI that should be valid for all intents and purposes and is only temporarily broken for reasons of your control. Maybe they would.
The issue is that the DOI is the main information in the Description: "See Koenker (2006) <doi:10.1017/CBO9780511754098> and Koenker et al. (2017) <doi:10.1201/9781315120256>" Roger has said that it refers to a book, but we currently have no way of knowing from that. The traditional way of citing (giving the book authors, year, title and publishers) is much less fragile.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford