The list of accepted papers at Graph Drawing (and their abstracts) is out now.

I have three papers there; I've already posted about one of them, and will likely post about the other two once preprints of them become available.

Relatedly, I just noticed that JGAA is using DOIs for its papers now. This strikes me as a very good thing.




Comments:

11011110:
2012-07-20T23:45:59Z

Pat Morin wrote to me (by email, since blog comments weren't working for him — sorry, Pat!):

I understand what DOIs do, but I don't see why they're so good, especially for an open access journal like JGAA.

I tried googling 5 random JGAA bibliography entries and, in every case, the paper on the JGAA server was available among the first 3 results. This tells me that a bibliography entry is just as useful for obtaining a paper as (and easier to partially remember than) a DOI.

Mainly, though, I'm annoyed that Crossref charges hundreds of dollars per year (plus $1 per DOI) for a service that isn't much more sophisticated than what you get from goo.gl, bit.ly, tinyurl.com, and so on, for free, without even creating an account. (Yes, I know DOIs have a management interface, but I still think it's overpriced in a world where there are many free email/file storage services that store let me store gigabytes of data for free.)

For me, the big reason for liking DOIs is their improved permanence compared to URLs (and to URL shorteners). If I refer to a paper by its DOI, I can be confident that in five or ten years time the DOI will still be a valid address for the same paper. (There are exceptions, but they are quite rare.) In contrast, journal publishers are free to change their URL scheme for their papers, and when they do, all the old URLs become invalid.

The fees they charge are an annoyance, though, I agree. For a commercial journal they are likely in the noise, but I saw from your post on Google+ that JoCG costs extremely little and that paying DOI fees would swamp any other expense for that journal. JGAA, like JoCG, is free to both authors and readers, based on volunteer sysadmin efforts and university-provided equipment and bandwidth, but I haven't asked where they're finding the money for the same fees.