The ACM Digital Library has a Fake DOI Problem

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2024-10-07 21:00:05

DOIs are unique, permanent identifiers for research artifacts. Publishers assign a DOI to a paper, then https://doi.org/ resolves it to the paper’s landing page in perpetuity. When publishers fold, they transfer stewardship to another entity and the link lives on. They’re academic permalinks, so you can find them in citations, on CVs, and in the metadata of papers themselves.

I noticed ACM DL’s odd DOIs while looking at the HRI 2022 proceedings, where every paper’s page has a URL that looks like https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3523760.3524000. The DOI implied by this URL, 10.5555/3523760.3524000, is not real and does not resolve. Turns out, ACM uses the 10.5555 prefix anywhere that it cross-lists content from another publisher, as in this case with IEEE. Each of these documents has a real DOI, issued by IEEE and resolvable to a page in IEEEXplore, but ACM won’t tell you what it is. This paper’s is 10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889569.

Exporting the citation for these cross-listed papers omits the DOI field, but the BibTeX key includes the fake DOI. This makes it easy to mistakenly use the fake DOI as the doi= field, especially since BibTeX keys are usually formatted as authorYYYYtitle.