CrossRef, the organization that administers the DOI system for linking to academic articles, has updated their display guidelines.

Before today, one was supposed to display DOIs as follows: doi:10.3765/sp.4, which is not immediately recognizable as a linkable URL. Usually, one would then associate a link to http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.4 with that display text to make it clickable (on a webpage or in a pdf).

Now, the display text itself is supposed to be the immediately recognizable URL http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.

This will necessitate updating all kinds of stylesheets, such as the sp.bst BibTeX style that we developed for S&P (and which implements almost the entire Unified Stylesheet for Linguistics Journals). Expect an update to sp.bst soon. Going forward, all S&P articles will comply with the new guidelines. We will also update the S&P website to display all DOIs in the new format.