DOIs have a business model. LSIDs currently do not. Without a business model (read funding) we should stick to something that doesn’t have the implementation/adoption impediment of LSIDs and make the best of it (i.e. just have a usage policy for HTTP URIs).

Without some kind of persistence mechanism the only advantage of LSIDs is that they look like they are supposed to be persistent. Unfortunately, because many people are using UUIDs as their object identifiers LSIDs actually look like something you wouldn’t want to look at let alone expose to a user! CoL actually hide them because they look like this: urn:lsid:catalogueoflife.org:taxon:d755ba3e-29c1-102b-9a4a-00304854f820:ac2009

Breaking of links is mostly due to administrative changes at the referencedInternet node

Over time the risk grows that the document is no longer accessible at the loca-tion given as reference. Web servers that follow the HTTP protocol then givethe notorious reply: ‘404 not found’. This resembles the situation of a book in a– very large – library that is not on the shelf at the position indicated in the cata-logue. How is it to be found?

check character (CC): A check character is incorporated in the assigned identifier to guard against common transcription errors.

On the other hand, the universal numeric fingerprint (Altman & King 2007) is a PID that supports citation of numeric data in a way that is largely immune to the syntactic formatting and packaging of the data

By contrast, repositories such as figshare (figshare 2016) and Merritt (Abrams et al. 2011) tolerate changes to metadata under the PID assigned originally, but create a new “versioned” PID if the object title or a component file changes, and in the latter case, the original non-versioned PID always references the latest version

The DataONE federated data network (Michener et al. 2011) assigns a PID to immutable data objects and a “series identifier” that resolves to the latest version of an object (DataONE 2015).

At a minimum it implies a prediction about an archive’s commitment and capacity to provide some specific kind of long-term functionality

persistence is purely a matter of service

Data Management: Provenance, Versioning, and ReliableIdentification

median lifespan of these web pages was 9.3 years

Content drift describes the case where the resource identified by its URI changes over time and hence, as time goes by, the request returns content that becomes less and less representative of what was originally referenced.