Thanks, Gregor -- this is very helpful, and I pretty much agree.
In short: allow any normal publishing practice, consider it as a special form of reference (like doi or ISBN) and observe the normal publishing practices of citing, especially avoid redundancies. Rich, I think you are too much thinking about general rules how to always handle it - but publishing practice for good reasons does almost the opposite (once and never again...).
Fair enough....and I'm sure I am over-thinking this. However, I still see problems with your proposed approached, in that I do not want big, cumbersome LSIDs (even once) interrupting the flow of prose.
I think I still favor the idea of a superscript indicator that can be easily ignored, easily clicked, and easily used to refer to a printed (not hidden) set of hyperlinks following the "Literature Cited" section. I think this strikes a resonable compromise/balance between how things are done in the publishing world, and how *I* think things *should* be done in the publishing world....
:-)
Rich