Digital Academic Objects: A History of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and a Trajectory Towards Academic Algorithmic Governance

• In Event: Equality By Design Vs Design For Appropriation In Digital Resource Sharing - I

Abstract

In this paper we trace the history behind a key node in the digital infrastructure for academic publishing and research object management, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), commonly referenced as providing a key service for academics--a stable and persistent identifier for ensuring the permanence of scholarship. Over the last twenty years, there has been a strong push by the DOI Foundation for the DOI to serve as the de facto standard for digital scholarly objects. This has led to growing network effects, creating lock-in for researchers and new forms of exclusion. We draw on a rich literature looking at governance by standards (DeNardis 2011; Gibbon & Henriksen 2012; Russell 2014); digital discrimination and algorithmic technologies (Apprich et al. 2019; Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018); critiques of the neoliberal university (Fitzpatrick 2019; Karaganis 2018); and digital surveillance and identification technologies (Agre 1994; Browne 2015) to argue that beyond an identification standard, the DOI has served to transform scholarship into material for an extractivist surveillance economy. This transformation now allows publishers to track, monitor, and extract further profit from scholarly outputs. Those of us working in institutions of higher education are increasingly entangled in these new forms of algorithmic governance, which have become embedded in the very socio-technical infrastructures of scholarly knowledge production. We point to possibilities of community-designed and governed infrastructures and tools that could allow us to reclaim a knowledge commons as envisioned since the dawn of the web.

Works Cited
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Authors

• Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough

• Angela Okune, University of California - Irvine