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Problems with dx.doi.org on January 20th 2015- what we know.

Hell’s teeth.

So today (January 20th, 2015) the DOI HTTP resolver at dx.doi.org started to fail intermittently around the world. The doi.org domain is managed by CNRI on behalf of the International DOI Foundation. This means that the problem affected all DOI registration agencies including Crossref, DataCite, mEDRA etc. This also means that more popularly known end-user services like FigShare and Zenodo were affected. The problem has been fixed, but the fix will take some time to propagate throughout the DNS system. You can monitor the progress here:

https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/doi.org

Now for the embarrassing stuff…

DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right?

The South Park movie , “Bigger, Longer & Uncut” has a DOI: a) http://dx.doi.org/10.5240/B1FA-0EEC-C316-3316-3A73-L So does the pornographic movie, “Young Sex Crazed Nurses”: b) http://dx.doi.org/10.5240/4CF3-57AB-2481-651D-D53D-Q And the following DOI points to a fake article on a “Google-Based Alien Detector”: c) http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.93964 And the following DOI refers to an infamous fake article on literary theory: d) http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/466856 This scholarly article discusses the entirely fictitious Australian “Drop Bear”: e) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2012.731307 The following two DOIs point to the same article- the first DOI points to the final author version, and the second DOI points to the final published version: