Today's world is electronic, there is vision of semantic web and yet we still submit references in numerous versions of various journals. In medicine, many journals have special rules about after how many authors you can put et. al. etc etc.
It is tedious to reformat references (even with EndNote or other reference managers) to suit a particular journal.
Are there any pioneer journals or initiatives to simply stop submitting references and just list a DOI instead (if one exist), and to "traditional refences only if DOI does not exist.)
LATER EDIT: In fact, people already try to do the opposite - convert PDF into list of DOIs. http://labs.crossref.org/pdfextract/
LATER EDIT: The receiving journal, after getting the article, would expand the DOIs into traditional references in the exact format the journals wants the references in the print version. Different journals would expand the DOI as preferred. A service at http://www.crossref.org/guestquery can expand the DOI (e.g., 1136/bmj.d7373 into XML with info such as:
BMJ
BMJ
0959-8138
1468-5833
01
03
2012
01
03
2011
344
jan03 1
Compliance with mandatory reporting of clinical trial results on ClinicalTrials.gov: cross sectional study
A. P.
Prayle
M. N.
Hurley
A. R.
Smyth
01
03
2012
01
03
2012
d7373
d7373
bmj.d7373
10.1136/bmj.d7373
20120103162404
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/doi/10.1136/bmj.d7373
Answer
It's not the horrible suggestion that many people seem to think it is -- there have been some complaints about miscounts in citation counts because of improper parsing of references; mostly because of some journals allowing non-standard abbreviations. (does A&A mean Astronomy and Astrophysics or Arts & Architecture? Many citation parsers don't use the context and have alternate rules for what journal the citation came from.
This could also bring up some other problems -- if someone's published a pre-print in arXiv ... but the final publication which may be substantially different. Very few people cite the arXiv paper directly, but it might actually be more appropriate than citing the final published version in some circumstances. (although, it would also show that perhaps those portions that you're citing didn't stand up under peer-review); you couldn't cite the arXiv via DOI, only via bibcode.
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Now, in most situations, the reference list for some journals is handled differently from the rest of the paper. In talking with the editor for Solar Physics, when I talked to him regarding a proposal for data citation, he mentioned that a problem was that giving a second URL to provide specifics would be an issue, and I believe he hinted that it was the publisher and not something locally developed.
Ideally, this whole thing would be integrated into the submission process, and then the reviewers would have the list expanded so that they can do their work. (and you'd probably want the submitter to verify the expansions) ... but this of course will take time from the publishers, who aren't exactly known to be nimble for the most part.
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What I'd suggest, so that you can get the benefits that you want, without waiting for the journals to make any changes, is to look into reference manager software, which let you collect your references in a database, with notes, and can then generate a reference list using the appropriate format. I've heard good things about a number of them (but never had a need for this purpose (the ones I've used were for shared project bibliographies). I'd look to see which ones can generate whatever citation style is appropriate for the journal(s) you submit to, or ask around to see if any of the people you collaborate might use one (as using the same one could be of benefit when collaborating).
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