Crossref, a nonprofit focused on metadata of scholarly publications, has suspended the membership of a company linked to websites which copied the appearance of journals belonging to Elsevier and Springer Nature, among others from major publishers, Retraction Watch has learned.
The move follows Anna Abalkina’s reporting on Retraction Watch about the activities of Springer Global Publications, which had used its membership in Crossref to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to papers in 13 journals with similar names to those established by legitimate publishers. The DOIs linked to papers on webpages mimicking the appearance of the original journals.
Springer Global Publications did not immediately respond to our request for comment on the suspension of its Crossref membership. The company previously told us it did not “create, review, or manage the content associated with the identifiers we issue,” and did not publish any journals.
The website of the company has also been suspended by its hosting provider, and is no longer available online.
Ginny Hendricks of Crossref told us the organization had suspended Springer Global Publications for “misrepresenting information on their application form,” because the company told us they don’t publish the journals they provide DOIs for. “Sometimes these things take months, but this was clear cut,” Hendricks said.
[Editor’s note: Crossref acquired the Retraction Watch Database last year and funds our efforts to maintain and update the repository.]
According to Crossref’s policies on suspending or revoking membership, the executive committee of the nonprofit’s board must review and ratify the decision to revoke membership. The board’s next meeting will likely take place in January, Hendricks said, but in the meantime Springer Global Publications “can’t access the system and are already suspended from membership.”
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So this case is pretty much plain phishing. But, now, I wonder why the DOI ecosystem does not operate also with hashes of the published articles? There are already web standards (i.e., subresource integrity) addressing rather similar problems.