...
That's not to say that making ARKs persistent is cost-free. Making any identifier persistent burdens you, the provider, with the costs of content management, hosting, monitoring, and forwarding. You can do those things yourself or with help from a vendor. With ARKs, just as with URLs, you will not be charged separately for your identifiers and you will not be locked in to a special-purpose resolution silo that also locks out other identifiers.
...
How else do they differ?
Here are some more differences between DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs.
- When, not if (because all things pass), the
https://protocol and the hostname cease to exist, only ARKs and URNs will indicate the type of identifier that remains. - For DOIs, Handles, and PURLs, you are required to use their respective resolvers. ARKs and URNs, permit you to use your own resolver.
- To create DOIs and Handles, you are required to pay a membership fee and, for DOIs, per-DOI charges. There are no fees for ARKs, PURLs, and URNs.
- Although you can use your own or a vendor resolver for your ARKs and URNs, all ARKs can be resolved via n2t.net, making it the closest thing to a "global ARK resolver".
- No standard The envisioned URN resolver was ever implementednever built, so URNs are currently resolved as if they were URLs. There is also no single global resolver for URNsURLs, and there is no designated global URN-as-URLsURL resolver. In order to register to create URNs, you must apply for a URN namespace.
- Unlike DOIs and Handles, ARKs don't have any metadata requirements and ARKs that haven't been released into the world can be deleted.
...