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DOI query

4 messages · Roger Koenker, Ivan Krylov, Brian Ripley

Original
Roger Koenker
# 
Recent package checking revealed that the CUP DOI for my QR book 
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511754098
is DOA so I duly wrote to CUP and the initial response is:
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.  I was led to believe that DOIs were like Platonic solids always there when you needed them.
Ivan Krylov
# 
On Tue, 19 Jul 2022 16:53:53 +0000
"Koenker, Roger W" <rkoenker at illinois.edu> wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
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 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?

            

      
      
      
    

        
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

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.

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Brian Ripley
    

    

      
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On 19/07/2022 20:32, Ivan Krylov wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Note that 'R CMD check' does not check URLs -- that is part of the 
CRAN-specific checking emulated with --as-cran.

            

      
      
      
    

        
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.

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Roger Koenker
    

    

      
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Thanks,  I?ll add details for both books referred to in Description and resubmit later today with the understanding that the DOI problem will be eventually fixed, and could be overlooked by CRAN meanwhile.

Roger