Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

It’s now 22 years since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote the classic document Cool URIs don’t change [1]. It’s core message is simple, and the title summarises it. Once an organization brings a URI into existence, it should keep it working forever. If the document at that URI moves, then the old URI should become a redirect to the new. This really is Web 101 — absolute basics.

So imagine my irritation when I went to point a friend to Matt’s and my 2013 paper on whether neural-spine bifurcation is an ontogenetic character (spoiler: no), only to find that the paper no longer exists.

Wedel and Taylor (2013b: figure 15). An isolated cervical of cf. Diplodocus MOR 790 8-10-96-204 (A) compared to D. carnegii CM 84/94 C5 (B), C9 (C), and C12 (D), all scaled to the same centrum length. Actual centrum lengths are 280 mm, 372 mm, 525 mm, and 627 mm for A-D respectively. MOR 790 8-10-96-204 modified from Woodruff & Fowler (2012: figure 2B), reversed left to right for ease of comparison; D. carnegii vertebrae from Hatcher (1901: plate 3).

Well — it’s not quite that bad. I was able to go to the web-site’s home page, navigate to the relavant volume and issue, and find the new location of our paper. So it does still exist, and I was able to update my online list of publications accordingly.

But seriously — this is a really bad thing to do. How many other links might be out there to our paper? All of them are now broken. Every time someone out there follows a link to a PalArch paper — maybe wondering whether that journal would be a good match for their own work — they are going to run into a 404 that says “We can’t run our website properly and can’t be trusted with your work”.

“But Mike, we need to re-organise our site, and —” Ut! No. Let’s allow Sir Tim to explain:

We just reorganized our website to make it better.

Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign.

Well, we found we had to move the files…

This is one of the lamest excuses. A lot of people don’t know that servers such as Apache give you a lot of control over a flexible relationship between the URI of an object and where a file which represents it actually is in a file system. Think of the URI space as an abstract space, perfectly organized. Then, make a mapping onto whatever reality you actually use to implement it. Then, tell your server.

If you are a responsible organization, then one of the things you are responsible for is ensuring that you don’t break inbound links. If you want to reorganize, fine — but add the redirects.

And look, I’m sorry, I really don’t want to pick on PalArch, which is an important journal. Our field really needs diamond OA journals: that is, venues where vertebrate paleontology articles are free to read and also free to authors. It’s a community-run journal that is not skimming money out of academia for shareholders, and Matt’s and my experience with their editorial handling was nothing but good. I recommend them, and will proabably publish there again (despite my current irritation). But seriously, folks.

And by the way, there are much worse offenders than PalArch. Remember Aetogate, the plagiarism-and-claim-jumping scandal in New Mexico that the SVP comprehensively fudged its investigation of? The documents that the SVP Ethics Committee produced, such they were, were posted on the SVP website in early 2008, and my blog-post linked to them. By July, they had moved, and I updated my links. By July 2013, they had moved again, and I updated my links again. By October 2015 they had moved for a third time: I both updated my links, and made my own copy in case they vanished. Sure enough, by February 2019 they had gone again — either moved for a fourth time or just quietly discarded. This is atrocious stewardship by the flagship society of our discipline, and they should be heartily ashamed that in 2020, anyone who wants to know what they concluded about the Aetogate affair has to go and find their documents on a third-party blog.

Seriously, people! We need to up our game on this!

Cool URIs don’t change.

[1] Why is this about URIs instead of URLs? In the end, no reason. Technically, URIs are a broader category than URLs, and include URNs. But since no-one anywhere in the universe has ever used a URN, in practice URL and URI are synonymous; and since TBL wrote his article in 1998, “URL” has clearly won the battle for hearts and minds and “URI” has diminished and gone into the West. If you like, mentally retitle the article “Cool URLs don’t change”.