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

Wed Sep 3 10:34:17 PDT 2025

Hi, Melissa,

Sometimes you end up with the two sites for the same journals when a
journal is hosted on a platform, but then for whatever reason, the
publisher decides to host it on their own platform either additionally or
while ending current access on the platform.
However, if the publisher made a deal with the platform for them to host
content and sell it with perpetual access rights then you still have access
on the host site.

So, for example if Journal of the Association of ABC Science didn't have
the ability to host it on the Association website, they might make a deal
with Science Direct to host the journal and allowed them to sell perpetual
access rights to the consumer. In this scenario SD is acting as a hosting
platform rather than Elsevier being the publisher.

Then a decade later the Association website goes through an overhaul and
they can host the journal themselves now. They canceled the SD contract,
but since when they made the content originally, SD was allowed to sell it
with par it stays on the SD platform for those years for those who
purchased access through SD retain access to those years as they paid for
those years with a contract that included perpetual  access.

A DOI is a persistent identifier, but it does not specify a single URL, so
it is possible the DOI may point to either or sometimes both places. If it
points to both, there is usually a screen that comes up asking you to
choose the platform - which confuses patrons, because they don't know which
platform the library has the full-text with.

And in some cases a journal could simply switch publishers for whatever
reason, but again if the previous publisher was able to keep access to the
years they published it then the DOI might show for that old publisher.

I hope that makes sense.

Susan

Susan R. Barber
Electronic Resources Coordinator
Paul and Rosemary Trible Library
Christopher Newport University
sbarber at cnu.edu
757-594-7046

On Wed, Sep 3, 2025 at 9:19 AM Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion
list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org> wrote:

> 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
> mbelvadi at upei.ca  902-566-0581
> ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4433-0189
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> Make an appointment <https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe
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