[Eril-l] Crossref multiple resolution of DOIs and multiple canonical archives: whither DOI vs openurl?

Thu Oct 23 12:03:34 PDT 2025

Melissa,

A discussion of 'canonical home(s)' does seem to assume that the location
of a digital object is an inherent part of its identity. I am reluctant to
share that assumption. It looks to me likely to elide many of the
attributes of digital objects which make them different from tangible
objects.

I don't object to using a DOI as *part* of a locator. This seems very
reasonable, and one could argue that this is what the doi.org resolver and
Crossref are doing. (And PLoS definitely described a system doing that.)
But I also don't object to multiple resolution if you supply such a system
with a DOI and nothing more. The trouble seems to me to come in when you
ask a third-party system to act as a link resolver when you pass it *nothing
but* a DOI. (At a minimum, I'd think for closed access works you'd also
want to pass user affiliation, for instance.)

I don't think the DOI system is the problem here. Publisher practice *might* be
a problem. Librarian practice* might* be a problem. Librarian and user
expectations *might* be a problem. But the DOI system is doing one thing—I
think its primary goal—rather well, and I think it's able to do that so
well because the system *doesn't* try to do the locating part. Mess with
it, and I think you'll get something worse.

Anna

-----
Anna Shields (she/they)
E-resources Librarian, Interim Systems Librarian
Williams College
on the unceded lands of the People of the Waters that Are Never Still
<https://www.mohican.com/brief-history/>

as67 at williams.edu
(413) 597-2041

On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 12:32 PM Electronic Resources in Libraries
discussion list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org> wrote:

> Interesting perspective, and can get us into a semantic debate about
> whether the location of the digital object is inherently part of its
> identification.
>
> The What and Whys of DOIs
> https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC261894/
>
> Many major academic publishers are using the DOI URL as their "direct to
> title" URL, eg in our holdings knowledge base (for us that's EBSCO).
>
> I think the train has left on objecting to the use of DOIs as a "locator".
> And I think the server location as resolved by Crossref is carrying a kind
> of metadata that is related to the object, namely who is the canonical
> "owner" (not in the copyright sense, but the maintenance responsibility
> sense) of the object.  I'm sure a lot of you are like me in playing around
> with multiple browser plugins like GetFTR, Nomad, Unpaywall, etc. that can
> lead users to non-canonical copies. And with the growth in multiple
> canonical "homes" (the topic of my original post in this thread), that
> "owner" metadata is getting blurry.
>
> I don't have a perfect answer, but I'm thinking that we do need to think
> on a big scale about modifying DOI, or at least DOI as implemented by
> Crossref, to deal with the multiple "owners" problem. A meta question might
> be: where does the responsibility for solving this problem lie? Crossref?
> Our individual knowledge-base vendors? Some kind of third-party (open or
> commercial) service that starts with the 'standard' DOI and can cross-check
> against our knowledge base to find the "right" canonical one for our
> patrons? Other?
>
>
> Melissa Belvadi
> mbelvadi at upei.ca
> Make an appointment: https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> on behalf of Electronic
> Resources in Libraries discussion list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
> >
> *Sent:* Thursday, October 23, 2025 10:52 AM
> *To:* Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list <
> eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Eril-l] Crossref multiple resolution of DOIs and multiple
> canonical archives: whither DOI vs openurl?
>
>
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>
> I am happy to be demonstrated wrong, but it seems to me that the problem
> is one of treating an *identifier* as a *locator*. A DOI is meant to
> uniquely identify a unit of scholarly expression. A link resolver might use
> a DOI to help correctly identify the work it has been asked to locate, but
> the DOI is not itself a location descriptor.
>
> Treating Crossref as a link resolver seems like a bad mistake.
>
> Anna
>
> -----
> Anna Shields (she/they)
> E-resources Librarian, Interim Systems Librarian
> Williams College
> on the unceded lands of the People of the Waters that Are Never Still
> <https://www.mohican.com/brief-history/>
>
> as67 at williams.edu
> (413) 597-2041
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 9:38 AM Electronic Resources in Libraries
> discussion list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Melissa,
>
> Thank you for bringing this up, this is a concern here too -- the multiple
> resolution screen, while somewhat rare, is confusing for both patrons and
> staff alike. Our most frequent instance of this happening is actually with
> Bloomsbury resources, with multiple resolutions to 2 different Bloomsbury
> collections. A user can't be expected to know which one they can access the
> item through, and honestly, sometimes I don't know either offhand without
> looking it up. Our e-resources team has largely avoided a stance on whether
> or not we recommend using DOIs, but I personally avoid using them,
> primarily for this reason.
>
> Gail
>
> Gail Murray (she/her)
> Electronic Resources & Serials Librarian
> Smith College Libraries
> 413.585.2925
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2025 at 8:44 AM Electronic Resources in Libraries
> discussion list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org> wrote:
>
> Hi, all!
>
> This is about DOIs for articles that have more than one
> "canonical"/official publisher home.
> That can happen, and does frequently, when a journal changes publishers
> and BOTH publishers maintain an official archive for PCA libraries.
>
> For instance, the 2006-2011 of the journal, Frontiers of History in China,
> where Brill has 2006-present and Springer-Nature, the previous publisher,
> has 2006-2011. Our only access is on SN because we did not continue the
> subscription in 2012 when Brill got it. But the DOI in our discovery
> service only leads to Brill, not SN.
>
> The NISO Journal Transfer database, https://journaltransfer.issn.org/,
> documents when journals transfer and includes whether the archive up to
> that point will be hosted by the transferring or receiving publisher.
> Sometimes it is actually both.
>
> It was recently brought to my attention that Crossref has a "multiple
> resolution" (MR) system, such that when following some DOI links, the user
> gets a list of links to each of the publisher platforms that are still
> "official" (I think by NISO's concept of that).
>
> I asked Crossref about what I should do to get an "MR" for this journal.
>
> This is part of the reply I got:
> However, just to set expectations, multiple resolution is used quite
> rarely.  Most publishers prefer that DOIs resolved directly to the version
> of the content on their particular platform.   And, the feedback we get
> from librarians about multiple resolution has honestly been primarily
> negative, because they don't like users to be faced with another decision
> point or extra friction in accessing the content.   (we do have a
> workaround to 'bypass' multiple resolution, for that reason, and resolve
> directly to either the primary or one of the secondary URLs)
>
> That said, the more typical solution is for libraries to link to content,
> not directly via the DOI, but using an OpenURL link resolver or discovery
> tool integration that will direct users to the appropriate subscription
> version for which they have full text access.  It's possible to integrate
> metadata from Crossref into such a tool, to facilitate linking more
> effectively.
>
>
> As I read and re-read that answer, it occurred to me to question whether
> the entire point of the DOI system is breaking down. When Crossref itself
> tells me not to use DOI links, but instead openurl links, which is where we
> were 20 years ago and whose problems were a big part of the reason for
> supporting the adoption of the DOI ecosystem in the first place, I feel
> like we are moving backwards in a context that I thought we had solved
> already.
>
> I know that DOI still works for "most" situations. But openurl also worked
> for "most situations", and still does. I worked at a library that was one
> of the very earliest adopters of openurl, and even wrote my own openurl
> resolver for my library before the commercial products existed. I have a
> long memory of how we got from there to here.
>
> So I wanted to consult your collective wisdom about this issue, both from
> the immediate "best service to patrons today" perspective and the
> "long-term where should our ecosystem be going next?" perspective.
>
> Your thought would be most welcome!
>
>
>
> Melissa Belvadi
> Collections Librarian
> University of Prince Edward Island
> mbelvadi at upei.ca  902-566-0581
> ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4433-0189
> my public calendar
> <https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/0fbab27c909e4493be65313bd66d66b6@upei.ca/5fa60af92c6d451c9ddf90c0bb11e00f15552192987609852692/calendar.html>
> Make an appointment <https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe
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