This is a very significant problem indeed. In our reference rot study (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.011

This is a very significant problem indeed. In our reference rot study (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253), we found that a very significant amount of papers were referenced by means of their landing page URL instead of by their DOI URL. As part of the "Signposting the Scholarly Web" work, we looked into this issue and thought that using a "canonical" link from the landing page URL to the DOI URL would be a good step. It needs to be understood that "canonical" was really introduced in the context of search engine optimization and is supported by web search engines. In essence, if a landing page would have a "canonical" link to the DOI RL, the content of the landing page would be indexed under the DOI URL. For browsers, the desired behavior would be to bookmark a page that has a "canonical" link under the canonical URL instead of the page's URL. At this time, to the best of my knowledge, this is not supported by browsers. However, it seems to me that it should not be impossible to achieve this, if, for example, the Persistent Identifier community (DOI, handle, PURL, ark, ...) would lobby for it. Alternatively, one could write an RFC and define another link relation type specifically for this relation type between landing page and persistent identifier. And lobby browser manufacturers to implement the "right" bookmarking behavior for it. But, the difference between "canonical" and this special-purpose relation type might be too subtle to make it through IANA registration scrutiny.