Crossref’s guidelines say that each object for which a DOI record is registered (each article, each chapter, each dataset, each book, etc.) needs to have its own landing webpage with a unique URL.
We talked (a lot) more about landing pages and their requirements in a Membership Ticket of the Month from two years ago. If you recall, a landing page must include three elements: 1) basic bibliographic information about the object for which the DOI is registered, 2) some way to access the article fulltext (e.g., a link to a PDF, a link to purchase, embedded within the landing page itself, etc.), and 3) the DOI itself, displayed as a hyperlink (https://doi.org/10.#####/abc).
We are sometimes asked, “What does Crossref consider adequate ‘basic bibliographic information’ to include on a landing page?”. Do I need to include my articles’ abstracts on their landing page? What about citation formatters, allowing readers to generate proper citations for my material in APA, MLA, or Chicago styles?
There is no set list of exactly which bibliographic details must appear on a landing page. However, here is my rule of thumb for what’s “enough”: If you encounter a DOI with no other information and you resolve it, can you immediately tell what object the DOI relates to?
Let’s take https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350363526 as an example. Resolving the DOI, you see this work’s title, ISBNs, date, author, and even edition number. It’s immediately clear from the landing page what this DOI corresponds to.
How about https://doi.org/10.14439/sjop.2015.0202.02? Here again we see a title, an author, a journal name, and a publication date – perfect!
By comparison, imagine clicking on a DOI that takes you to an edited book’s table of contents. There is no indication on this page whether the DOI you have just resolved relates to the book as a whole or one of its individual chapters. In this instance, the landing page does not provide unambiguous information about what object the DOI corresponds to, and thus the landing page is not adequate.
On the other end of the spectrum, imagine clicking a DOI and being presented with just an article’s title and a link to its PDF. Maybe the article is “Mouse models of cancer”, but there are multiple different articles in different journals with this title. This landing page provides too little information about which object the DOI corresponds to, and thus it is also inadequate.
Of course, readers can always copy and paste a DOI into our metadata search if it’s not clear what the DOI relates to, but the goal of this post is to emphasize that proper landing pages with ample bibliographic details should save end-users the trouble of this extra step.
In short: the landing page should make it unambiguously clear what thing the DOI corresponds to. Extra information like abstracts is always nice to have but is not required.