How and where to report registered but "broken" DOIs?

Technical Support
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Hello!

I feel like I should know this as a Crossref employee, but I’ve also come upon this question outside of and prior to my work with Crossref, so I figured it might be worth asking publicly since I didn’t already see the answer on here.

DOIs are intended to be persistent identifiers but they can only be persistent if the members who register them update their landing page URLs if the landing pages change. Sometimes, I run across a DOI that has been registered (i.e., it does not resolve to the DOI Foundation error page, below) but it doesn’t lead where it’s supposed to. It might lead to a blank page, a 404 error, a gambling website that has usurped the old publisher’s domain, or even a proper landing page but for the wrong article!

An error page on doi.org for the fake DOI "10.5555/unregisteredDOI". The page says "DOI NOT FOUND" and offers a form for users to report the error.
An error page on doi.org for the fake DOI "10.5555/unregisteredDOI". The page says "DOI NOT FOUND" and offers a form for users to report the error.690×392 24 KB

When a DOI is unregistered, as in the image above, it’s easy to use the DOI Foundation’s form to report the unregistered DOI to the publisher. But it’s not always clear where to send reports of DOIs that are registered but don’t resolve where they should. Should I as a researcher/librarian/random person try to contact the publisher myself? Or should I connect with Crossref - and if so, what’s the best way to do this?

Thank you!

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Hi @collinks ,

We, technical support, refer to these reports as ‘metadata quality improvements.’ We get a number of these each week. You can report broken resolution URLs here in the community forum or to support@crossref.org. @eatoni is helping an author correct a number of these broken DOI links right now on this forum post.

When reporting the problem, if you have a functioning landing page URL, please do include that in your post. What we’ll do is reach out to the member responsible for the DOI(s) to confirm the correct resolution URLs. If a URL is provided to us, we’ll give the member in question a week to get back to us. If we don’t hear back after that week, we’ll update the resolution URLs in question (if URLs are provided to us).

We’d all prefer to have DOIs linking over to the actual content than off to a blank page, a 404 error, or a gambling website.

-Isaac

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