[rfc-i] ISBN and DOI

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

On 29 May 2012, at 16:30 , John R Levine wrote:

> our indexing stinks

That's true. I tried a few searches in Google Scholar, and the results vary widely per RFC, with many duplicate but not always obviously duplicate results. I think it would help a lot if there weren't so many slightly different versions of each RFC floating around.

Perhaps it's time to ask people who mirror the RFC series to set "noindex" for their mirrored documents.

> By the way, if we added DOIs, it wouldn't require inventing new numbers. If our DOI prefix were 10.2468, a reasonable DOI for RFC 1234 would be 10.2468/RFC.1234.  The design is pretty reasonable, the question is whether we think it's worth the fees to put all the RFCs into the DOI database.

The authors or the IETF don't make any money from RFCs, I don't see why a third party should. People who are knowledgable to use DOIs should be able to find stuff using traditional references anyway, IMO.