Here's another example of the lack of visibility of scientific literature in online discussions (probably caused by people not knowing if the papers are open access or not, so wanting to link to a readable summary):
Slashdot reports on a PNAS paper about bird flocking behaviour, but only links to a news blog post on Environmental Graffiti, which itself only links to a report in The Telegraph, which doesn't link to anything. You have to actually go to PNAS.org, search for 'starlings' and sort the results by 'newest first' before you find the actual paper (which is, happily, open access after all).
There's a danger in this chain that information can become misinterpreted, or at least that by the end of the chain there's not really much useful information left.
The other problem is that it's hard to pick up conversations around the paper, because few of the posts identified which paper they were talking about (they could still be clustered by text similarity, perhaps).
There's also a preprint on arXiv (in 2 different versions), which might have been discussed earlier on, and was bookmarked in CiteULike.
It may be that only Google [Scholar] is able to condense and canonicalise all this information, as it really needs an index of the whole web.
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OpenURL (and COinS) are a solution to linking to licensed content, meant to link the user to the "appropriate copy" of the content, since there are often various restricted copies of a given article on the web, only a subset of which are available to any given user.
Of course, it's full of problems. Starting with the fact that the user needs to belong to an institution that operates a link resolver. And going from there.
But it deserves mention as one actually existing solution in this domain.
Of course, in your example case, since the actual article is open access after all, why the heck didn't the slashdot poster just link to it? Well, probably because the process of tracking it down was too much for them, or because they assumed it wouldn't be open access. Another question is--why doesn't the original Telegraph article provide a url to the study?
I think an important reason the Telegraph article doesn't include a link to the original paper is that they're working from a press release, which rarely contain a permalink to the paper for the journalist to use.
You've hit it, Alf. It's bugged me for years how blogs will reference a science paper, waste innumerable electrons gushing over it, and yet link only to the press release. Usually, it's the technology blogs that do this. Actual science bloggers tend to behave better in that respect.