Legacy DOIs mixed with newly minted DOIs: How to handle different DOI prefixes?

Software Support
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How are other journals handling a situation where a journal is coming onto an OJS install you host, and the articles have legacy DOIs, but going forward will have DOIs through your institution’s account?

The issue is that the DOI Prefix is entered into a single setting at the journal level. So, I can enter the older DOI prefix, then I can load the older articles. Then I can change the DOI prefix to my institution’s prefix, and assign DOIs going forward. But, that changes all the DOIs (the prefix is stored at the DOI plugin settings, while only the DOI suffix is stored with each article).

I know that there is also an option to have a custom identifier for each article and for each PDF/file. For the journal I’m working with at this moment, the journal also has a reference number for each article, so there’s another custom identifier in use. But also the custom identifier for articles looks as if it’s just being used by the software for search engine optimization. The custom identifier is used to make URLs for articles, but I can’t search on the custom identifier and it doesn’t come out with metadata in OAI-PMH.

Any ideas on clean handling for legacy DOIs made under a different institutional account and with a different prefix, and going forward newly minted DOIs made under your institution’s account?

I’m thinking to do the journal’s custom identifiers as an article-level identifier, then do the DOIs as the PDF/file-level-identifier.

-Wilhelmina

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And… I’ve realized that trying to put the DOI in as an identifier on the article or on the PDF will break links, because of the / between DOIsuffix/DOIprefix .

I can’t be the only one with multiple DOI prefixes in play on a long journal run.

How can I handle these multiple DOI prefixes?

-Wilhelmina

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OK, this is solved, but it’s clunky. Here’s how I’ve handled legacy DOIs.

  1. On the DOI plugin settings, pick a prefix to work with and set the prefix.
  2. Add the DOIs minted under that prefix.
  3. Go back to the plugin settings and change to the next prefix.
  4. Work through the DOIs for the second prefix.
    and so on, through all prefixes used for the journal.
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