OJS 3.5.0.3 – Infinite redirect for Google Scholar crawler on /en/article/view URLs

Software Support
1

Hello,

We are running OJS 3.5.0.3 with PostgreSQL and nginx, and we’ve been alerted by the Google Scholar indexing system that some article URLs are returning an infinite redirect loop to the crawler.

The issue appears to affect URLs in the format:

/en/article/view/<id>

Examples that trigger the redirect loop:

However, the following URLs seem to work normally:

When testing with:

curl -I -L https://revistas.usp.br/rieb/en/article/view/70039

we can observe the infinite redirect behavior.

From the Scholar team’s feedback, this is typically caused by requiring cookies and redirecting to the same URL when no cookie is presented (which is the case for crawlers).

Questions:

  1. Has anyone encountered this behavior specifically in OJS 3.5.x?
  2. Is there a recommended way in OJS to bypass or avoid cookie requirements for crawlers (e.g., Googlebot / Scholar)?
  3. Could this be related to locale handling?

Any guidance on where in OJS (or server configuration) this behavior is typically controlled would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Tarcisio Pereira

2

I happen to encounter this last week and reported it: Redirect loop for cookie less browsers/tools · Issue #12375 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub
From what I observed it seems the cookie is not required for the journal default language.