I don’t normally scrape Twitter, but there’s been a lot of useful comment on the ACS spider trap. The consensus (among the people I follow) is that it’s
- irresponsible,
- inappropriate
- seriously obsolete
Here’s two authorities you can trust:
@crossRefNews. CrossRef is the central gateway for most DOI resolution and they are a solid part of scholarly publishing:
- @rmounce DOI is registered trademark of International DOI Foundation, using “doi” in this way clearly wrong. #ACSgate
- @rmounce We assume it’s a prank–Prefix is Wiley, landing page is Informa. Message re ACS. Suffix is odd–999999? #ACSgate
- @rmounce Pubs sometimes put DOI strings in proprietary urls. A true DOI link goes through the DOI resolver dx.doi.org. #ACSgate
- @rmounce Rarely, sketchy pubs publish strings they call DOIs but are not deposited with any registration agency. #thatsnotcool #ACSgate.
- @rmounce But not legitimate publishers like Wiley, ACS, and Informa #ACSgate
And Cameron Neylon – a highly respected scientist working with PLoS
- @rmounce @Suelibrarian @petermurrayrust it’s not a registered DOI with crossref but it is misleading to use that url structure
- @invisiblecomma @rmounce @petermurrayrust do other publishers do this? Seems both crude and dangerous?
So the consensus is that no responsible publisher would do this sort of thing. Perhaps it got in without ACS knowing? Was it a hack? or malware in a service they used? I’m waiting for ACS’s answer.
I’ll note that none of this happens with full Gold #openaccess. PLoS has no need to stop people reading articles. J. Machine Learning Research wants everyone in the world to read articles.
Paywalls and the associated technical and legal security are a massive cost imposed by the closed access model. If we spend 10 Billion USD on closed access per year, and if only 2-3% is paywall and legal technology, then that’s already hundreds of millions of University subscriptions.
Libraries, are you happy that your subscriptions are being used to support this? I’ll ask this question at Leicester today.
While I don’t doubt that the CrossRef tweeter is right about the DOI stuff, I don’t think their conclusion that it was a prank is sound. I could believe that a hack/malware could be responsible for getting the link in there and then displaying the ‘IP blocked’ message when clicked (as some kind of joke), but would it really be possible for a hack/malware to block IPs from the entire site? Without ACS knowing? That seems like a different level of interference altogether.
Also, looking at the HTML in the original post on this blog – it says:
Why would a hacker or similar leave a neat little comment explaining what the link is?
We await the ACS response which will doubtless make all clear 🙂
Ooops, I was undone by HTML tags, that should read “Also, looking at the HTML in the original post on this blog – it says: !– Spider trap link –“
@fluorogrol is right I was tweeting for @CrossRefNews and speculated about this being a prank before I knew what was really going on.
The ACS has issued a statement: http://pubs.acs.org/page/announcements/20140404_announcement.html
CrossRef expanded on the brief tweets quoted above focusing on the issues about DOI reliability in our own statement as well:
http://www.crossref.org/crweblog/2014/04/crossref_dois_play_no_role_in_.html