Use Digital Object Identifiers for research papers

Nice post @surfermarly. I have one tip when linking to academic research papers. The tip is to link to the paper using its DOI, which stands for digital object identifier.

The DOI for "Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication" is 10.1515/jplr.2010.011 as you can see in the bottom of the page from your PDF link (note that DOIs are case-insensitive). You can make a URL for a DOI by appending https://doi.org/. Hence, you could link to Hardaker 2010 using https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2010.011.

There's one gotcha: the DOI generally redirects to the version of record for a study. In this case, this is a page on degruyter.com which tries to sell me access for $42.00. Ridiculous.

But all you have to do is use https://oadoi.org (stands for Open Access DOI). So if you try https://oadoi.org/10.1515/jplr.2010.011, you'll be redirected to the same free PDF you originally linked to.

So what's the benefit? DOIs are more durable. Academic publishers have terrible technology practices and link rot is a huge problem. DOIs help address link rot, but adding a redirection step. Furthermore, DOIs have metadata, so they easily allow looking up study details. For example, see the Crossref metadata for Hardaker 2010.

TLDR: if you're linking to a scientific study, consider using its DOI and oadoi.org if the paper is behind a paywall. This is especially important when you're making content that hopes to last forever!