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

Fri Oct 24 06:00:53 PDT 2025

I hope everyone else isn't bored with this exchange.

For the authoritative description of the "DOI system", I figure the right source is the DOI Handbook, https://www.doi.org/doi-handbook/DOI_Handbook_Final.pdf
It makes very clear in sections 1.2 - 1.3.1 that "resolving" a DOI to a web address is very much an appropriate part of what it is for, eg:
"The DOI name can be resolved to a resource, such as a web or internet resource, metadata describing the entity, a landing page with access to further resources, etc.
For example, a DOI name representing an article resolves to the web address of the HTML file version of the article."
That quote is in the subsection labeled "Basic Principles" and is even in the first bullet of that section, so it's not just a question of publishers and librarians using it wrong.
Sections 1.5 and 1.6 elaborate on the web site resolution concept. And large parts of the rest of the document are focused on the details of "resolution", with most examples involving going from the DOI to a document on the web.

We might be quibbling about what DOI "System" means. The Handbook clearly posits that that system is intended to include, or even be centrally about, resolution services and organizations. In that sense, the DOI "system" includes Crossref and other organizations (including knowledge base (KB) management companies like EBSCO and the individual publishers) that implement the vision of DOI as a resolution solution that is clearly described in that Handbook.

It even directly addresses the "multiple resolution" issue that started this thread, in 5.4.2 (PDF page 67).

I'd like to suggest that the minimal multiple resolution system that Crossref has been trying is inadequate, as their own experience with feedback has revealed.

And that what we librarians need is some kind of combined service that "knows" of the multiple URLs/"resources" for a given DOI, and can then get enough affiliation information about the user (assuming the resources aren't OA) to filter the list down to the ones the user can actually access. I feel like I just described what we already have with KBs, except those are starting to themselves rely on the DOI resolution as more and more content providers are eschewing supporting OpenURL and using DOIs instead.

I just ran an sql query on a recent full download of all content in our KB, to see how many of our records use "doi.org" in the URL field.
I found 33 "packages" (mostly equates to publishers) with a combined total of 44,000 titles using doi.org as their primary URL. The vast majority are Cambridge UP.
That's out of about 3.3 million non-deduped records.

That doesn't seem like a crisis. However, in our discovery system, there are also "custom" links that don't use the KB links to take the user to the full text, but some other way of generating a "persistent" link, including OpenURL but also if the citation record has a DOI, using that. I can't generate any kind of count on how often the DOI is trying to take our user to the full text.
But I know it fails sometimes because such an incident is what got me started on this.

Do any of you see situations where your discovery system uses DOI and takes your user to the "wrong" full-text copy? If it never happens, are you using some commercial service outside of your discovery system, like LibKey?

Melissa Belvadi
mbelvadi at upei.ca
Make an appointment: https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/
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Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Crossref multiple resolution of DOIs and multiple canonical archives: whither DOI vs openurl?

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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<http://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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>
Make an appointment: https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/
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From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto: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<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>>
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2025 10:52 AM
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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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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
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