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

Sat Sep 6 01:56:52 PDT 2025

An example of Crossref’s interim page: https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447335719.ch008 -- a book chapter published by Bristol University Press / Policy Press but the content is hosted by three or four co-operative publishers / hosts.

Kind regards,
Dom Benson
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Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Two "home sites" for same journal, does DOI define canonical/authoritative?

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CrossRef’s statement sounds great!  In practice, though, I see LOTS of DOIs that resolve to the copy on the publisher’s sales page, not to the licensed content, to a more restrictive version, and other variations on not getting the user to the copy they can access.

Athena

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

Maybe this clarifies it:

" CrossRef DOIs conventionally link the user to a single source of material but, in select circumstances, an item might exist in multiple locations or formats. The DOI specification supports a practice called multiple resolution in which multiple URLs may be attached to a single DOI. As implemented by CrossRef, instead of delivering the user directly to content, the DOI resolves to an interim page containing citation metadata and multiple links to an item. This feature has been enthusiastically adopted by members who co-publish journals, as it allows them to dually host an authoritative version of an article." https://www.niso.org/niso-io/2010/06/dois-journals-linking-and-beyond

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

On Fri, Sep 5, 2025 at 8:59 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:
Thank you; a lot of this makes sense to me.

However, a DOI can only ever point to one URL. There is no mechanism for a specific DOI to point to more than one.
If an article is available on more than one platform, each will have different DOIs. I've seen this with JSTOR archival journal articles, for instance.
One of the major reasons for DOIs is that if the publisher changes their platform so old direct article links would break, or the content is moved to another platform through the sale or other kind of transfer/partnership, the endpoint platform would tell Crossref etc. that that DOI now needs to point to the new location.

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

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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<mailto: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<mailto: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
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University of Prince Edward Island
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