Ticket of the month - May 2023 - DOI error reports and unregistered DOIs

Reports
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1

Hello again,

For this month’s ticket of the month post, I’m going to touch on DOI error reports. I was reminded with a few support tickets this month that these reports initiated at doi.org do cause confusion. I’m here to clear that up.

What is this DOI error report?
The DOI error report passes along complaints from users about DOIs our members may have published or distributed but not yet registered with Crossref.

When a user clicks on a DOI that has not been registered they are sent to a form on doi.org that collects the DOI, the user’s email address, and any comments the user wants to share. We pass those reports and comments along nightly to the technical contact that each of our member’s designates on their account, the person(s) responsible for the DOI prefix. The data is recorded in a .csv attachment.

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These reports very often (but not always) identify problems in our members’ registration processes/systems so we ask our members to pay close attention to them. Any legitimate DOIs (DOIs published) found in this report should be registered immediately. When a DOI reported via the form is registered, we do send out an alert to the reporting user (if they’ve shared their email address with us).

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Some DOIs reported by end users are the result of user error (e.g., the end user has included a typo in their DOI link), so if you, as the Crossref technical contact, have established that the reported DOI is not a legitimate DOI you’ve published, no action is needed.

How is this report confused?
Sometimes our members believe that reporting an error through doi.org will be investigated by our Crossref technical support team. For members who think they have registered a DOI(s) and then to see the DOI NOT FOUND error at doi.org when resolving the unregistered DOI, please contact our technical support team here in the Community Forum or at support@crossref.org for help in investigating the cause of the error.

Any DOI resolving to a DOI NOT FOUND error on doi.org means that the DOI has not been registered. If you, as a Crossref member, are expecting your DOI to be registered, this error message means it is not.

Thanks for reading,
Isaac

Activación de DOI
2

Hello there, I have this DOI error issue, and I have reported the error as stated above on various events, and I have not received any email. Yet it has not been resolved. When I contacted the journal, they said, "The DOI is not yet active until activated by Cross-Ref, which usually takes time.”
Additionally, I have noticed that the DOI for the entire issue, which is Volume 23, Number 3 (2025), has not been activated; could you please assist?

3

Hi @Arhyel, thanks for asking about this (and welcome to the Forum).

Do you mind sharing the DOI and/or name of the journal in question? This will help us troubleshoot the problem with you and the publisher.

4

Hello @Collins, thanks.

Absolutely, the name of the journal is Sokoto Journal of Veterinary Science

5

@Collins, The publisher is African Journals Online/10.4314/

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@Collins, I tried sending the referring page link, but a message said that links can not be sent on this platform.

7

@Arhyel - Thanks, I see the journal here. It appears that the latest two issues, 23(2) and 23(3), have unregistered DOIs. I’ll connect with AJOL to see if they’re able to get these registered promptly, and we will be back in touch here once this is completed.

Thank you for raising this matter with us!

1 Like
8

@Collinks A bountiful of thanks to you. It is really frustrating if your work can not be discovered electronically. Hoping to hear from you soon.

2 Likes
9

Hi @Arhyel - it looks like AJOL has now successfully registered the DOIs in the latest two issues of the Sokoto Journal of Veterinary Sciences. Please let us know if there’s anything further that we can assist with!

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Hello @Collinks , yeah, AJOL has successfully registered the DOIs. Hoping that Google Scholar will pick them up swiftly.

1 Like
11

It looks like Google Scholar has picked up articles from the latest issues of the journal! It’s worth noting, though, that Google Scholar does not have any relationship with Crossref and to the best of our knowledge does not use Crossref metadata.

1 Like
12

Mine has not been picked yet from the latest issues. Manually adding it to Google Scholar won’t allow me to see the number of citations, etc