[Eril-l] Two "home sites" for same journal, does DOI define canonical/authoritative?

[Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list]

Hi,
I was exploring a situation involving a journal that has both a publisher website with its full text archive and also some kind of partnership with Elsevier so it also has a full text journal "home" site on ScienceDirect. (SD) I've run into this before but this is the first time I explored in more detail because our full text rights are not the same on both platforms for certain archival years.

I used one specific article from 2013 as my test case.
Both sites give the same DOI for that article, and through Crossref, that DOI takes you to the SD site, not the publisher site.
I then tried searching the article title on Crossref just to be safe, and that too led to only one DOI which was the SD one.

I am deliberately not naming the journal because the official information we got from the publisher is that they don't offer post-cancellation access (PCA, also sometimes called "perpetual access rights" or PAR), and we don't currently subscribe, and I don't want to draw attention to the fact that we do have PCA on SD for the years we paid for in the past, just not on the publisher website.  I have also verified that our access is not part of our "Big Deal" package with SD.

What's going on here? Have any of you explored this kind of situation in more detail to figure out what's going on?

More generally, what does it mean to the Schol Comm world for a journal to have apparently two co-equal (in an authoritative sense) home sites? If a citation to this article in another peer-reviewed journal gave the publisher's URL rather than using the DOI, would they be 'wrong'?
I can see authors thinking the publisher's site is the "official" one. Does DOI override that? Should peer reviewers pay any attention to this, or journal editors?


Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
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