The good news is that the merger of Blackwell's digital content with that of Wiley's has not affected the DOIs, which is exactly as you'd expect, and is a nice demonstration of the power of identifiers that use indirection (although there was a time when Wiley was offline).
For example, the article identified by doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x had the URL
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x and now has the URL http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118833573/abstract. The DOI, of course, hasn't changed, so anybody linking to the paper via the DOI (for example, in a blog) won't be affected.
Naturally, not everything is rosy. The Canadian Journal of Zoology has managed to break just about all their DOIs. Surely the must come a time when CrossRef starts automatically checking DOIs and alerting publishers when they are broken?
Boy oh boy would I like that. And how about some sort of automated system for users of DOIs to let publishers know when they are broken?
ReplyDeleteIn response to Dave Munger's comment, CrossRef welcomes reports of broken links here: http://www.crossref.org/DOIComplaint/.
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