[MrGunn]

To solve your immediate problem, just grab the DOI here: https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery They also have an API from which you can fetch DOIs in various ways.

DOIs are a solution to the issue of having persistent, publisher-independent links that will always resolve, even if a journal changes publisher or goes out of business. Academia uses them because link rot is unavoidable across the web, but there must always be a link to the publication that resolves so that when someone in 2070 wants to follow a citation in the references of a work published today, they can do that. It's the same thinking that underlies people pointing to the internet archive in Wikipedia citations. It's a layer of redirection, but in a way that preserves accessibility for the long term. It's also the same thinking that underlies DNS. There shouldn't be one company that controls how to resolve an IP address to a domain name, and likewise you shouldn't have to go through one publisher to resolve a reference to a research article.

As a side note, Crossref is staffed with exactly the sort of web geeks that you would see at an Internet Archive get-together (#).

So I hear your frustrations, but I think you're giving DOIs short shrift.

(#) I mean, just look at this. A dump of all journal metadata on Academic Torrents. Is that not cool? https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-m...