After reading the actual study the article summarizes, I suspect this is much ado about nothing.
At most, it seems to me the study demonstrates that lots of Digital Object Identifiers (doi:) are assigned but never used. I have no doubt that is true - just like there are lots of domains that are assigned but never used, lots of articles of incorporation filed where the business never files a tax return, marriage certificates obtained where a marriage never occurs, etc etc.
The article does not give specific examples where a doi: is referenced in Google Scholar or Pubmed or some other academic database and then the article cannot be found. Indeed - I do a whole lot of academic literature searches and I am not sure if I have ever encountered such an experience.
Can anyone here give an actual example in any discipline where you have done a literature search, found a an abstract or other metadata describing an article of interest to you, then you could not resolve the doi: to the actual article?
jlsc-16288-eve.pdf (921.3 KB)