Duplicate DOIs keep being minted

Content Registration
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Hello @rdmpage ,

Thanks for following up on this. As you’ll remember, Amanda Bartell, our head of membership, wrote a forum post about what we’re doing about registration of duplicate DOIs.

I won’t rehash all of those details, but we continue to: 1) stress this to our members who are acquiring ownership of transferred journals and journal articles; 2) flag the registration of DOIs that have similar bibliographic metadata registered with us (with a warning at the time of registration called a conflict); and 3) proactively contact members who are still registering those duplicate DOIs.

Our colleague Dominika did recently rerun and expand the research that she began on this topic in 2020. She’s presented that internally, and several of us are meeting later this month to decide on a plan based on her findings.

Here’s what we know:

  1. We’re talking about less than one percent of all content registered with us; sure, that’s a lot of content;

  2. We all agree that we want to further reduce the registration of duplicate DOIs;

  3. We, too, have seen and are aware of these examples of “branded” duplicates. We’d like to put an end to that altogether. We’ve contacted several of those members about this and continue to work to curb the practice;

  4. We’ve also been working on cleaning up existing examples by having those members flag a single definitive DOI (we call this the primary DOI) in cases where duplicates have been registered. We’ve also seen examples of the best intentioned members mistakenly registering duplicate DOIs due to human or system error. I’ve been working with one such member on cleaning up a mistake like that for over a year.

Amanda also mentioned that we want to improve how we expose duplicate DOIs in our REST API. While it remains a high priority, we have not yet made those changes: [CR-175] - Jira.

We’ll post an update in the community forum when we have definitive next steps.

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