[EP-underground] Re: search by paper ID

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Brian Josephson wrote:

> Once upon a time (~5 years ago) I persuaded the cogprints admin that it was 
> vitally important for people to be able to access papers by their ID.  This 
> facility seems to have been removed.  To rehearse the arguments for this:
> 
> There should be a standard form way to refer to a given paper.  It is 
> overly complicated to have to give the URL, which might in theory change 
> (while I am writing, you should get round this possibility by registering a 
> domain such as cogprints.org for the purpose to stop routers automatically 
> enquiring of soton.ac.uk which may for all we know disown the archive in 
> the future).  For example, the physics preprint archive at arxiv.org 
> routinely uses notations such as physics/0302012.  If I want to refer 
> someone to my paper on the physics archive I just give that code, and when 
> they go to the server's home page they just select 'physics' and type the 
> number in in the page that appears and that takes them to the abstract. 
> This process just doesn't work if you remove the ability to get to a paper 
> by entering its ID (maybe no-one used the id facility; if that is the case 
> that only shows that cognitive scientists are not as clued up as physicists 
> are).
> 
> Regards, Brian Josephson
> 
> PS if the ID search facility still exists, can you tell me how to get to it?

Dear Brian, it sounds like a very good idea. I will ask Chris to reply to you
(and me) about whether it is possible, or can be made possible.

(My vague grasp of the technical side makes me wonder whether things like OpenURL and
DOI's don't already make this further ID superfluous...)

Chrs, S

> 
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