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.
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).
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