Where this all gets interesting is non-traditional scholarship, e.g. sharing on social media where there are lots of 'publishers' (twitter, reddit) and they don't particularly care about best practice from the scholarly publishing industry. How do you get someone to share the persistent link? You can't force them. It's not a solved problem, and probably never will be.
In the context of scholarly articles, if you're reading an article, the references will be linked via DOI, e.g. here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Where this all gets interesting is non-traditional scholarship, e.g. sharing on social media where there are lots of 'publishers' (twitter, reddit) and they don't particularly care about best practice from the scholarly publishing industry. How do you get someone to share the persistent link? You can't force them. It's not a solved problem, and probably never will be.
Herbert Van de Sompel is working in this area http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/home/ with things like canonical link headers that indicate the canonical URL of a given page. Here's a presentation he did on the subject, which he calls 'signposting the scholarly web': https://www.force11.org/video/signposting-scholarly-web