Crossref DOIs, persistent discovery, and the digital preservation of 7.5 million items

Crossref DOIs, persistent discovery, and the digital preservation of 7.5 million items, by Martin Paul Eve. It's hard to know what is preserved, and that seems to me quite a fundamental problem. I write this blog wearing my Crossref hat. The point of the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) that we issue is that the link to the content is persistent. If the original publisher goes bankrupt or disappears for any reason, we can re-point the DOI to a successor publisher or to an archival source such as CLOCKSS or the National Library of the Netherlands, or Portico (or to multiple such services). The link will still resolve to the content. This is a way of ensuring persistent discoverability and accessibility in the long term. But if there's no preservation service protecting the content to which a DOI is assigned, then when the publisher goes out of business, the DOI will stop working.