> It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something.

It's a great idea, and today in 2025, papers are pretty much the only place where using these shortened URLs makes a lot of sense. In almost any other context you could just use a QR code or something, but that wouldn't fit an academic paper.

Their specific choice of shortened URL provider was obviously unfortunate. The real failure is that of DOI to provide an alternative to goo.gl or tinyurl or whatever that is easy to reach for. It's a big failure, since preserving references to things like academic papers is part of their stated purpose.

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dingnuts a day ago | parent [-]

Even normal HTTP URLs aren't great. If there was ever a case for content-addressable networks like IPFS it's this. Universities should be able to host this data in a decentralized way.

	▲	justin66 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A DOI handle type of thing could certainly point to an IPFS address. I can't speak to how you'd do truly decentralized access to the DOI handle. At some point DNS is a thing and somebody needs to host the handle.
	▲	nly a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		CANs usually have complex hashy URLs, so you still have the compactness problem