Jon Udell :: A conversation with Tony Hammond about digital object identifiers

Originally published by Jon Udell on January 26, 2007. Jon posted a follow-up to this podcast on his blog.

Tony Hammond works with the new technology team at Nature Publishing Group. His company publishes a flock of scientific journals in print and online including, most prominently, Nature. It also operates Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists. In this week’s podcast we talk about digital object identifiers which are, in effect, super-URLs designed to survive commercial churn and to work reliably for hundreds of years.

Many of us are becoming publishers nowadays, and we’d like to imagine that all our stuff could enjoy that level of consistency and durability. Few of us are prepared to make the necessary investment, but it’s interesting to hear from someone who has.