Known Issue: DOIs are not loading in rich text

[eastofesten]

Multiple communities have reported issues with references, where DOIs are not loading as rich text.

Last month, Crossref reported degraded performance of its Public REST API, which we used for loading citations on Pubs. During this incident, it took too long for Pubs to load citations properly, leading Pubs to crash.

We committed a fix to this to reduce crashing. As part of this fix, if a Pub is unable to get information from Crossref quickly, it will default to displaying the DOI or URL as the reference. This allows the reference information to be retained and the pub to load successfully. Additionally, per Crossref’s recommendation, we have switched to the Polite REST API to improve troubleshooting measures.

Crossref is still making updates to its API, particularly in rate limiting and load balancing. As noted in the title & seen in the screenshot above, you may see that certain citations do not fully load, and instead only display the DOI. We will make updates as Crossref moves to a long-term solution.

What you can do in the interim:

• Update references in your Pub draft by reentering the DOI and waiting for the citation to load successfully. Then, push a new release.
• Perform a hard refresh on your Pub by holding down the Shift key on your keyboard and clicking the reload icon on your browser’s toolbar.
• Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the citation tool is more successful loading citations via the new DOI format (10.1000/182) over the old DOI format (doi.org/10.1000/182).