Revista de Ciencias Técnicas Agropecuarias adopt dynamic QR codes as permanent identifiers

In the last decade, the different publishing systems have insisted on the need to provide documents published in scientific journals with permanent identifiers that allow accessing to the metadata of their publications, and recovering the content. The permanent identifier most used by publications worldwide is the DOI (Digital Object Identifier), but because of the United States blockade to our country, our journals cannot be requested from the North American company CrossRef.

Faced with this problem the Revista de Ciencias Técnicas Agropecuarias has decided to adopt dynamic QR codes as permanent identifiers for its documents. QR codes, or rapid response codes, are two-dimensional bar codes that were created in 1994 by an automotive industry to track vehicles during manufacturing. Currently, their use goes beyond this initial application and they are used to update metadata and retrieve any type of content or object, including electronic documents published by a journal.

Dynamic QR codes are reusable just like DOI, that is, they can change their content as many times as desired without changing the code itself. This is possible because the code redirects you to a web database where all the metadata of the publication are hosted, including, of course, your electronic address. If at any time the journal changes, for example, its web location, the same code will allow accessing to the new electronic address since only the URL is changed in the QR code database, but the image remains the same, for this reason they are named permanent identifiers.

 How can a QR code be used?

Access to the content of a QR code can be done in two ways. The first is simply to scan the code with a mobile device (smartphone, tablet) that has a pre-installed QR code reader. The second way is to upload the image of the code to an online QR reader like the address https://herramientas-online.com/leer-codigo-qr-online.html and similarly returns the information. Note that the code will return only a short address like this: http://opn.to/a/xepZN  and when accessing it you will find the metadata record of the publication including the real electronic address where the document is hosted.

From this moment on, who publishes in the Revista de Ciencias Técnicas Agropecuarias, will have a permanent identifier that will make it possible to always recover his/her publication starting from the same QR code.

Sincerely,

Editorial Committee of the Revista Ciencias Técnicas Agropecuarias.