(I wasn’t sure where to post this, but ISR seemed the most likely place.)
I think it’s common knowledge that predatory publishers and journals are increasingly problematic in the world of scholarly output.
Earlier today, we (publisher) received an e-mail from someone writing on behalf of the “Science Research Society” in India, offering an absolutely outrageous sum of money to purchase an old monograph series in which we published two volumes in 2002 (digital version published in 2010) and 2004, and which has since not seen any new publications.
Assuming this was a scam, I Googled, but couldn’t find very much about the scam or indeed the so-called ‘society’. I did, however, come across this article, which describes an outcome of a similar situation. In particular, this comment mentions the ‘society’ by name as a predatory publisher involved in this type of scam, and also adduces that they have Crossref prefix 10.52783 – which, going by their list of works, is ‘home’ to no less than 18,210 DOI records. PSIref also lists them as a suspected predatory publisher.
So my question is – what is Crossref’s policy on this type of thing? Are predatory publishers and journals blocked and their prefixes and DOIs nulled out with a notice? I assume they’re not deleted outright, since that would violate the principle of permanence behind DOI, but I also assume Crossref isn’t interested in abetting predators whose activities undermine and threaten academic integrity?
All good questions, and yes, this is a good section to discuss this sort of thing.
A Crossref DOI is just a record that an item exists - it doesn’t say anything about the quality of the item. And we definitely don’t delete records, as one of the fundamental principles of Crossref is persistence. But the DOI itself is just a small part of the picture - as you know, each record’s metadata is actually really helpful for the community (including a growing body of “scholarly sleuths”) to identify deceptive practices. So even if we’ve revoked Crossref membership for an organisation, we don’t delete their DOI records. Having said that, we are actively considering adding a field into the metadata to identify that these records were registered by an organisation whose membership was revoked. We do have the option to revoke membership in certain cases (more here), and we recently updated our terms to clarify this (more here). We’ll take a closer look at Science Research Society. Thanks for raising this!
what you describe is very similar to a phenomenon I’ve been studying recently. We describe our investigation in the following articles (available open access in Zenodo, I can’t include links):
Invasion of the Journal Snatchers: How Indexed Journals Are Falling into Questionable Hands
Tell-Tale Signs of Stealth Journal Takeovers: A Bibliometric Approach to Detecting Questionable Publisher Acquisitions
I hope it is relevant to your situation.
I actually created this account to share some details about this investigation, as they relate to DOI handling, but so far I’ve been unable to create a post in this section.
Thank you for sharing, and welcome to the Community Forum @albertomartin ! I have upgraded your account so you have full privileges. Feel free to create posts and add links to your messages.