QR codes can contain just about anything, including the URI (doi:foobar) form that the tattoo uses. QR codes themselves will probably go the way of USB: In a million years there's going to be someone looking at the driver code saying "you sure we can't get rid of those early versions" just for someone to chime in saying "your keyboard still uses USB1".
Because you can't read the article by reading it's number, and there isn't enough room for the whole article on normally visible parts of the body (not to mention the cost of that tattoo).
The QR code would give you a way to copy/paste the id so you can actually give and, you know, read the thing.
Probably loads less then you would need for signage. I reckon you could get away with no redundancy if you went with a large enough base size on the grid.
You can go as far as replacing the square “pixels” with circular dots and it still reads fine, qr codes are kind of amazing.
You can make QR codes that copy text to a clipboard right? Can't you just make it a DOI search term? Or pay $2/yr for a redirect domain that you can point to where you want later
Sure, but that $2/yr company goes out of business after 10 years and the QR code stops working.
I guess making the number just copy into your clipboard would be a decent option, but you can also just copy/paste text from images now, so why go through the trouble of QR coding it when that only makes sense to a computer?
Use the search tool below to innovate on the affordable class of .xyz domains made up of 1.111 billion possible 6-digit, 7-digit, 8-digit, and 9-digit numeric combinations, between ‘000000.xyz’ through ‘999999999.xyz,’ now 99¢ per year, every year.
A QR Code encodes a string of text. In can be a URL, or anything else. Like the DOI string above, a quote, or whatever. You can't do full Unicode I think, it's 8859-1, or something like that, although there's also an Asian variant.
But your camera phone can already copy text. If it's a tattoo about the first paper you wrote, whatever you make needs to work for 60+ years. Text is always going to be valid, who knows when QR codes will become obsolete. 60 years ago you'd be getting a tattoo of a punch card, and that would be mostly meaningless today.
I was just addressing the fact that QR Codes were only for URLs. As for whether they'll be around in 60 years... Barcodes have proved to be fairly resilient.