The DOI doesn’t always lead to the appropriate copy

Following the NISO webinar earlier this week, Margery Tibbetts, University of California, cautioned us about how we weight the DOI element in the completeness index we are developing:

Subject: NISO OpenURL presentation

Hi Elizabeth and Adam,

Thank-you for the IOTA presentation during the NISO openURL webinar this morning.

When you were talking about weighting elements the presentation implied that DOIs could receive a high weight. In my opinion you need to think about this very carefully. If the OpenURL only contains the DOI and your link resolver fetches metadata from CrossRef the metadata returned is limited and I have found cases where it is incorrect. The DOI doesn’t always lead to the appropriate copy, it leads to the publisher’s copy. One case we have encountered is the IET titles in the IEEE Xplore system. The IEEE Xplore system uses DOIs for article level linking to their content but the IET DOIs resolve to the publisher and not the IEEE Xplore system so we had to come up with a work around.

The workaround:

We deactivated the IET titles in the IEEE Xplore target and created a new target for the IET titles which uses the IEEE target parser but doesn’t do the CrossRef lookup. Since the IET title list, including title changes, is relatively small this was a workable solution. One of the engineering librarians work with us to identify the titles.

Margery

Results of Link Failure Poll from Oct. 13 Webinar

During the October 13 NISO Webinar, "It’s Only as Good as the Metadata: Improving OpenURL and Knowledgebase Quality", my colleague Elizabeth Winter asked the audience of some 169 three questions about OpenURL quality. Here are the results I quickly wrote down.

Poll Q1: Your opinions on this statement: “A significant problem for link resolvers is the generation of incomplete or inaccurate OpenURLs by databases (for example, A&I products).”

Strongly Agree: 32%
Agree: 51%
Neutral/Don’t Know: 14%
Disagree: 1%
Strongly disagree: 0%


Poll Q2: How often do your patrons experience problems with OpenURL links?

Daily: 45%
Weekly: 32%
Monthly: 14%
Never: 0%


Poll Q3: What do you think causes the most problems with OpenURL links?

Incomplete or poorly constructed OpenURLs: 38%
Errors in link resolver knowledge base: 38%
Errors in link-to-syntaxes: 3%
Other: 0%
Don’t know: 20%