Linkrot is real and digital preservation problematic. One reason why I have started migrating my blog to a more robust platform. That first step gave me version control. This summer my blog was accepted to Rogue Scholar. That gave me DOIs. And an idea.

Things are coming together, and while commercial publishers (SpringerNature, Elsevier, MDPI, Frontiers, etc) are focused on profit (“shareholder value”) instead of the community they serve, Open Science is providing working, real-world, inexpensive, superior FAIR solutions for scientific dissemination. Maybe European universities are not convinced yet (see Björn’s post), but it is happening.

Two things that are happening are OpenAlex and OpenCitations. CiTO adoption not so much yet, but I am not giving up yet. Simply because Open Science doesn’t go away and everything can be picked up tomorrow. Each holiday I am picking up the Citation Typing Ontology and this holiday the use of nanopublications for CiTO intent annotation of April this year.

Yesterday, I played with the nanopublication templates used by NanoDash, got to the triples of it, and ended up using the web interface to create a derived template from Tobias’ template from April. What makes this nanopublication template special is that it uses the CiTO ontology.

The difference is that the original template used ScholarlyWork as type for the citing resource, while the derivative uses CreativeWork from the schema.org namespace, allowing things like this:

The last three are possible because of the Rogue Scholar DOIs. Let’s continue with the fourth example, the blog to blog citation. While an URL is a unique, global identifier, the digital preservation depends on a lot of things. On the other hand, a DOI with the associated metadata is easier to preserve. For example, because it can be spread more easily than the digital object itself.

So, when Martin Fenner and I started archiving the Depth-First blog of Rich Apodaca to digitally preserve his blog, it also automatically gave the blog posts DOIs. This makes the blog more FAIR, just like it does for my blog. And being more FAIR, we can use the DOIs for other things too, like blog to blog citations with CiTO intent annotation, as nanopublications. (Technically, any Springer Nature journal can do this, but they found reasons to not do it.)

So, let’s take this blog post. I have today updated this to not use depth-first.com URLs but, following Martin’s example, use the DOIs for those posts instead.

And when I make a nanopublication out of this, I can add the citation intent, and then it looks like this:

For some reason, the DOIs do not show up as references as they do for this post for the DOIs of the posts of Martin Paul Eve, Björn Brembs, and Martin Fenner. It does for this post citing Depth-First.

So, from now on, I will use DOIs when citing other blog posts, and I hope many other blogs will start using Rogue Scholar or some other service to generate DOIs for single blog posts. I also have to figure out if I want to use DOIs to link to posts in my own blog. And hopefully, OpenCitations will soon accept citations provided by nanopublications. With or without CiTO intent annotations, whatever comes first. Oh, and I cannot wait to see the citations who up in Altmetric.com :)

Let’s see where this is going.