Does anyone related to scientific publishing have experience using EOI's as the identifier for the articles in a journal?

Question

I'm part of the editorial committee of a small open access ecology journal that is slowly growing Currently, our journal doesn't have the means to pay for the doi service, but we found this service which offers a different identifier, the EOI. We asked for additional information and some of the claims the state are:

"You will be eligible to get EOI for any number of papers for your publication."

"You need to pay one-time membership charges USD $100..."

"No charges per EOI."

"For DOI you need to pay USD $2 per DOI, which cost really high for journals and membership charges ranges from USD $300 to USD $100000."

"Both these objects serve the same purpose, but in EOI we provide more flexibility & tools will be provided periodically for submission, no charges for errors (will be corrected by Citefactor staff)"

They also list a sample of journals that use their service, which are not necessarily highly recognized, but then it would be also our case.

Is there any other alternative around to have a proper unique identifier for our articles?

Answer 1

I'm Ed Pentz, Executive Director of Crossref. I don't know anything about EOI so can't comment on it. I did want to correct the information you've been provided. Crossref charges annual membership fees from US$275 to US$50,000 but many smaller members join via a Sponsoring Organization and pay much less - please contact a sponsor if there is one in your country. We charge US$1 per current journal article and US$0.15 for older content. Fees for preprints, books and grants are different - full information on membership and fees is available. We have over 13,000 members in 139 countries so are very inclusive. It's not just about the identifier - registering content with Crossref means it's discoverable along with over 114 million other content items. Feel free to email [email protected] with any questions.

Answer 2

Beware! This is a "predatory PID" (PID = persistent identifier). It is a dishonest institute that mirrors the more-serious, community-owned infrastructure of the DOI (digital object identifier).

While DOIs offer open metadata etc., there seems to be not a single EOI yet which resolves properly and that offers openly accessible metadata.

Thus, similar to "fake impact factors", the EOI creates a "parallel" (meta-)scientific infrastructure, probably with the goal to monetize it.

This is corroborated by the fact that the person(s) or organization behind the EOI are the same as the ones behind the "CiteFactor" (https://www.citefactor.org), which is yet another predatory variant of the Impact Factor.