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