Study Shows 13 Percent of Online Citations for Scientific Articles Disappearing
Being able to use the Internet for professional research has been hampered since its inception by the inability of publishers to provide enduring citation references to content stored there. This problem was highlighted in a recent study by team from the University of Colorado published in Science magazine and highlighted at CBS MarketWatch [REGISTRATION]. Over a 27-month period, up to 13 percent of citations for articles in three major journals took a holiday. The OpenURL standards in circulation since May offer some hope that there may yet be a universal solution to this problem, but in the meantime Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System is gaining significant headway in its registration of content objects used in scientific, library and professional publishing circles. While DOI lacks some of the contextual, user-centric finesse of OpenURLs, the ability of DOIs to address the fundamental quandary of providing consistent content addressing capabilities will hopefully provide a way for content providers of all kinds to maintain consistent historical access to many forms of highly valued content. Once content is consistently addressable and in a standard format, though, it places yet more pressure on aggregators to define the value of their services to institutions that are increasingly aware of the power of their organizations to collect and manage content access and distribution on their own.