Thanks for clarifying: we definitely don't want to remove doi's, other identifiers or permanent links to paywalled versions of articles. In part this is a bit self serving: one of the only metrics we have for impact of Wikipedia Library donations for partners is the number of links or dois added to Wikipedia (User:Samwalton9 currently collects these manually; if you know anyone that can help us build a tool to help make these reports produced semi-automatically, and with historical recording, we would love to save him the time: weigh in at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102064 ). Without that metric, we don't have much of a business case for getting the partnerships (its not all good will: for many of the publishers its about visibility of their collections/databases). That being said, there will never be a situation where we police volunteer use of links to partner sources: its all based on if editors feel adding links is appropriate - it just happens to be a good way of tracking impact. 

The secondary reason for not wanting to remove links: we should definitely be maintaining that particular location as the "authoritative version" per WP:V, WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT, and any number of other good scholarly practices. Moreover, at some point in the future, we would like to send readers around the paywall through to their local library --> libraries have the most clout in changing the existing publishing marketplace, and many of our readers are entitled to some form of access through their library. In part, we hope to do that through educating readers; for example, we would like to pilot on reference sections links to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Research_help (see concepts at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Research_help/Demo ). In part, we had hoped to use one of OCLCs tools to make it easier (after about a 1.5 year discussion, Jake ended up not getting a commitment of developer support changes in their platform to make this happen), but would be open to supporting other tools that resolve editors to their local library's database access if its available. Our soon to be announced partnership with EBSCO will send readers to a portal on their end that suggests a local library, as does JSTOR and a couple of our other partners websites. However, it would be preferable to be able to do this on the Wikipedia side, before showing up at the paywalled database, where there are asks for pay-per-use, etc. 

If anyone on the list has ideas, strategies, or connections to people that could help us be better at both promoting OA and resolving readers and editors to authoritative sources, please let us know on or off list.

Cheers, 

Alex Stinson

Project Manager 

The Wikipedia Library