Publisher has switched DOI registration agencies, CrossRef DOIs now point to a content farm

[rdmpage]

I’ve come across a somewhat bizarre case where CrossRef DOIs appear to have been abandoned by a publisher, and the destination of those DOIs has been taken over by a site that seems to be a content farm.

The journal FRAGMENTA ENTOMOLOGICA now has DataCite DOIs for its articles, e.g. AFROTROPICAL TYCHIUS: DESCRIPTION OF FIVE NEW SPECIES AND DESIGNATION OF A NEOTYPE (Coleoptera, Curculionidae) | Fragmenta entomologica. But at one point this journal had CrossRef DOIs, such as 10.4081/fe.2013.24 which for which metadata is still in CrossRef’s search engine: Crossref Metadata Search

The DOI 10.4081/fe.2013.24 resolves to http://www.fragmentaentomol.org/index.php/fragmenta/article/view/24 which redirects to https://www.fragmentaentomol.org (screen shot below).

It looks like the publisher abandoned both the DOIs and the original web site, someone has taken over that domain, and now a bunch of CrossRef DOIs no longer point to scientific articles but a bunch of spam. Meanwhile the articles now live on a different site complete with different DOIs. I don’t think the publisher really understood the point about persistent identifiers.

[Shayn]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

The best case scenario in situations like this is to see if we can get the publisher to provide us with a mapping of the Crossref DOIs to the equivalent DataCite DOIs. Then, we can ask the people who manage the Handle system to alias them at the handle. If that all works out, anyone who tries to resolve one of the Crossref DOIs will automatically be redirected to the landing page for the equivalent DataCite DOI.

I’ll reach out to the publisher to get that process rolling.

-Shayn

[rdmpage]

Thanks @Shayn, I realise that this is an edge case, and not much fun to try and resolve.

Rod