Concerns regarding stealth journal transfers and DOI mismanagement

Crossref strategy Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR)
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Concerns Regarding Stealth Journal Transfers and DOI Mismanagement

Hello everyone,

My name is Alberto Martín-Martín, and I’m a researcher in the field of bibliometrics and scholarly communication.

Apologies in advance for the length of this message. A Crossref staff member suggested that this forum would be the appropriate venue to raise the issue I describe below.

Background

In 2024, my colleague Emilio Delgado and I began investigating a troubling phenomenon that we believe has become more frequent over the past six years: the stealth acquisition of scholarly journals (originally indexed in selective citation indexes such as Web of Science or Scopus) by entities with little or no publishing track record, or with previously identified connections to predatory publishing practices.

These acquisitions are rarely publicly announced, and often go unnoticed by the research communities that publish in these journals, at least initially, until editorial standards deteriorate or questionable practices become evident.

We have published our findings in two articles:

The Problem with DOIs

As part of our analysis, we examined DOI behavior in 36 journals we identified as being linked to publishers that engage in these type of journal acquisitions. Our findings raise multiple concerns:

1. Emergence of “Fake” DOIs

Many of these journals began assigning DOI-like strings to newly published documents that are not registered with any DOI registration agency and therefore do not resolve. We refer to these as “fake DOIs”, since:

  • They appear systematically after the ownership change.
  • They persist over time.
  • The pattern is consistent across multiple journals.

This suggests a deliberate strategy, rather than a technical or administrative error.

These fake DOIs have already propagated to other bibliographic databases such as Web of Science and Scopus (though less so in platforms like OpenAlex, likely due to different metadata ingestion practices).

I believe Crossref may already be aware of this type of issue, because at some point I encountered a list of journals flagged for using fake DOIs on your site (I don’t remember where).

2. Breakage of Existing DOIs

We observed many cases where DOIs registered before the transfer ceased to resolve, either due to the articles being removed or due to technical failures on the new journal website.

Again, this is a known issue, but in this case we noticed it happening to many of the journal in our analysis, which makes sense if we assume that the goal of the new owners of these journals is just to obtain economic profit via new submissions, and not to maintain the scholarly record, which takes effort.

3. Misuse of External DOIs

In a few cases, journal articles displayed Zenodo DOIs corresponding to entirely unrelated documents, perhaps because the DOI strings were generated using correlative numbers, just to make it look as if the document has a DOI, and some of those DOIs were already registered.

This is a more clear sign of lack of interest in editorial quality by the new publisher, as it is difficult to imagine this type of error happening systematically by mistake.

A singular case: the journal Profesional de la Información

However, the main reason I am posting here, is because of a case that deviates from the previous three issues mentioned (for which there is probably little that Crossref can do), and is perhaps even more concerning. It involves the journal Profesional de la Información (ISSN 1386-6710, E-ISSN 1699-2407): https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/index

Timeline & Ownership of Profesional de la Información

  • Originally published by Ediciones Profesionales de la Información SL (a Spanish publisher).
  • Sold in late 2023 to a new publisher, according to a private mailing list announcement, which described the buyer as “a new division of the English publisher OAText”. This was later confirmed to Spanish media.
  • However, subsequent calls for papers listed the new publisher as Oxbridge Publishing House.
  • To add to the publisher confusion, these call for paper announcements were issued by the former publisher, even after the ownership transition had supposedly taken place (since January 2024).
  • As of today, the journal’s website still does not clearly identify its current owner or managing publisher (against basic guidelines for good editorial practice). The websites of OAText and Oxbridge Publishing House do not mention the journal Profesional de la Informacion either.

Editorial & Indexing Consequences

Throughout 2024 and 2025, Profesional de la Información has shown declining editorial standards and a lack of transparency:

  • In 2025, after the publication of our first paper, Web of Science delisted the journal (along with other journals in our analysis), mentioning citation manipulation as one of the reasons.
  • Scopus also publicly announced plans to delist all journals flagged in our analysis, but has not yet done so.
  • The “Editor-in-Chief for Europe and the Americas” (a position created after the transfer) publicly blamed an “Asian editor” (who has never been listed on the journal’s site) for the misconduct. There has not been any clarification as to whether this editor was relieved of their duties.
  • Shortly thereafter, the entire editorial board and multiple assistant editors were removed from the site, with no explanation.
  • Currently, the “Editor-in-Chief for Europe and the Americas” is the only person with an editorial role listed by the journal website.

Despite the current absence of an editorial board, the confirmation of the existence of at least one editor whose identity has never been publicly disclosed and who has engaged in publication misconduct, and the continued lack of clarification on the journal’s current ownership, the journal continues to publish new content.

DOI Issues Post-Transfer

What is particularly alarming is that DOIs are still being registered for the journal Profesional de la Informacion under the Crossref prefix of its original publisher, Ediciones Profesionales de la Información SL (prefix 10.3145), a year and a half after the transfer. The most recent DOIs registered by this publisher for the title Profesional de la Informacion were created in July 2025.

The available metadata suggests that Ediciones Profesionales de la Información SL remains the entity registering DOIs for Profesional de la Informacion, while also continuing to manage other titles under the same DOI prefix. Consequently, Crossref records reflect no change in ownership, which stands in contrast to the expectations set by the Crossref ownership transfer protocol.

Furthermore, we have identified cases of metadata discrepancies in articles published after the transfer: in two articles published by the same authors, the metadata registered in Crossref does not match what appears on the journal’s website. These two records display entirely different article titles in the Crossref metadata and on the website (not to mention that the content of these articles is wildly outside the scope of the journal). These articles exhibit characteristics consistent with paper mill activity:

Finally, the journal’s website no longer hosts any articles published before 2007, and the majority of 2007 content is also missing. As a consequence, the corresponding DOIs no longer resolve, rendering more than ten years of academic output unavailable to the public and the scholarly record compromised.

Request for Clarification

My main concern is that the DOIs for articles published after the transfer are apparently still being registered by the previous publisher, which no longer owns the journal. Although journal owners may externalize DOI registration to other publishers, as a record of publications I would expect Crossref metadata to be accurate in recording which publisher is responsible for the content that is published, and events such as title ownership changes. In this case, however, Crossref metadata shows that the publisher of journal Profesional de la Informacion continues to be Ediciones Profesionales de la Información SL, which is now factually incorrect, again, according to a statement from the previous publisher’s owner.

Both entities currently associated with the journal (Oxbridge Publishing House and OAText) are, or have been, Crossref members. It is unclear why ownership and control of the DOI records have not been properly transferred, in accordance with Crossref’s own guidelines:
Crossref: Transferring responsibility for DOIs

Considering the recent incidents of publication misconduct and lack of editorial transparency associated with Profesional de la Informacion, it seems plausible that the continued ambiguity around its ownership is not accidental, but rather a strategic decision, and that, for some reason, the journal’s former publisher is actively facilitating this arrangement. Former editors of other Spanish journals acquired by OAText have publicly stated that OAText requested its name be withheld from the journal website after the transition, which lends credibility to this interpretation.

Intentional or not, the journal’s current publisher is being misrepresented, and this inaccurate information is now disseminated through several channels, including Crossref metadata.

Final Thoughts

I would appreciate any guidance or insight the Crossref community might provide on:

  • How Crossref addresses ongoing DOI registration under incorrect publisher identities;
  • What mechanisms exist to enforce title ownership transfers;
  • Whether this case (and others like it that may be found) might warrant further investigation by Crossref.

Thank you for your attention and for the important work you do in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

Kind regards,
Alberto Martín-Martín
Associate professor, Universidad de Granada, Spain

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2

Hi Alberto

Thanks for posting this in the forum - I’m interested to hear the community’s take on what you’ve discovered.

I have some answers for some of your more Crossref-related questions.

Increase in “Fake DOIs”

At Crossref, we are sometimes informed about fake, DOI-like strings being displayed on publisher websites - so identifiers that have the structure of a DOI, but aren’t actually registered with one of the registration agencies and which don’t actually resolve or have a metadata record associated with them.

If these fake, DOI-like strings are on a website belonging to a Crossref member, we work with the member to ensure that these DOIs get registered with us. It’s an obligation for Crossref members to register DOIs for everything they publish after joining, and to ensure that these DOIs resolve to an active landing page. Usually un-resolving DOI links are due to a technical problem and the problem is solved after we point it out and spend some time working with the member, but if not, it could be a reason for membership revocation.

If these fake, DOI-like strings are on a website that doesn’t belong to a Crossref member, we will email any contacts on the website “contact us” page to ask them to remove them. We will try to contact them a few times, including sending an official letter. If there is no response, or they don’t remove these strings, we add them to this public list, which I think is what you might remember seeing in the past. You can get to that public list from this section on our website which covers organisations which claim to be Crossref members when they are not.

Breakage of existing DOI links

As I mentioned above, ensuring that DOIs continue to resolve to an active landing page is an obligation of membership. We’ve previously only been able to monitor this in a reactive way (as it’s reported to us as a problem by the community) but our new Data Science team has started helping us to identify members with a high percentage of DOIs which resolve to a 404 in a more programmatic way. We are then able to work with the relevant members to ensure that this problem is solved. Again, usually this problem is solved after we point it out and spend some time working with the member, but if not, it could be a reason for membership revocation.

Title ownership transfers

The first time that a DOI record is registered for a work under a particular title (ie an article in a new journal), we create a title record in our system, which ties that title record to the DOI prefix belonging to the member who made the first registration. This means that a different member cannot then register records for works in the same title record (eg articles in the same journal) on a different prefix.

But if a different member officially takes over that journal, we can move ownership of the title record in our system to the new owner. We only do this with the permission of the original member. This happens very regularly as journals work with, or get acquired by, different members. There’s more information about that process here.

We respond to requests from members to change the ownership of a title in our system, but we don’t (and can’t) proactively monitor which organization is currently responsible for a particular title.

Profesional de la Informacion
This specific title is currently (and seems to always have been) registered with us by members Ediciones Profesionales de la Informacion SL in Spain. We’ll reach out to them separately to ask them to confirm if they are still responsible for this title, and also to follow up on any broken DOI links.

I hope this helps with some of your queries.

All the best

Amanda

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