What, though, do we actually know about the state of persistence of these links? How many DOIs resolve correctly? How many landing pages, at the other end of the DOI resolution, contain the information that is supposed to be there, including the title and the DOI itself?. . . .
Let’s talk about the resolution statistics. Other studies, looking at general links on the web, have found a link-rot rate of about 60%-70% over a ten-year period (Lessig, Zittrain, and Albert 2014; Stox 2022). The DOI resolution rate that we have, with 97% of links resolving (or a 3% link-rot rate), is far better and more robust than a web link in general.
Is 3% a good or a bad number? It’s more robust than the web in general, but it still means that for every 100 DOIs, just under 3 will fail to resolve. We also cannot tell whether these DOIs are resolving to the correct target, except by using the metadata detection metrics (are the title and DOI on the landing page, which we could only detect at a far lower rate). It is entirely possible for a website to resolve with an HTTP 200 (OK) response, but for the page in question to be something very different to what the user expected, a phenomenon dubbed content drift.
https://www.crossref.org/blog/what-do-we-know-about-dois/
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