This post provides an example to illustrate why a research author should not assume that every article of theirs will be properly indexed. As result, this work may not be seen by potentially interested parties searching for pertinent work with salient keywords, despite the work's merits. Metadata mismatches and broken linkages can unwittingly emerge during academic publishing, and may persist if not checked, flagged, and corrected. This post gives helpful advice for correcting or working around a few key problems. It shares the practical example of errors that impacted a South African journal article's availability after its digital publication on the 1st of December, 2025:

As a research blogger, I like to share Altmetrics badges for my publications, but none is available for Brandjacked via badge.dimensions.ai/details/doi/10.10520/ejc-crim_v38_n3_a2?domain=https://journals.co.za. Nor for a PlumX badge, searching with Branjacked's DOI value at https://plu.mx/plum/a/?doi=10.10520/ejc-crim_v38_n3_a2.

Thinking that this may have been caused by the manual record I created featuring the initial DOI, I chose to delete the article from my record. Then went into Google Scholar trash and selected ‘Delete Forever’. However, the article available for manual selection (Figure 5) still links to a '404 not found' result.

A manual entry created on ResearchGate (at  researchgate.net/publication/398814505_Brandjacked_for_social_media_advert_fraud_Microcelebrities'_experiences_of_digital_crime_in_South_Africa) lists the correct DOI (Figure 6), but it also showed a '404 not found' error when attempting to link to the digital publication.

As a shortcut for checking-and-reporting DOI errors, authors should open www.doi.org, then scroll down to the 'Try resolving a DOI name' section. There they can enter a DOI value to check it, and report a DOI URL address that fails in throwing a '404 not found' error.  

Acta Criminologica’s ‘Open Access’ policy initially provides restricted access via the South African Bibliographic and Information Network (SABINET)'s archives. These are available via university libraries’ annual SABINET subscription for SABINET African Electronic Publications (SA_ePublications). There is a 12-month open access embargo from the date of publication/loading on
the Criminological Society of Africa (CRIMSA)’s website. 

Perhaps being published before the Christmas holidays in an access-restricted versus open-journal format contributed to Brandjacked only being downloaded five times in the first two months. But even achieving that readership is not been helped by a ghost-listing amidst a heavy stream of academic publications. As Trend MD reports, nearly 8,000 research articles are published everyday. In this flood of articles, the visibility of our niche publication is not assisted through not being indexed in aggregators for academic (meta-)data or authorial content registries. Consequently, it is vital for scholars to work with the journal, their publisher, and co-authors to achieve work-arounds. Authors should also build awareness around remedying any root causes that undermine their visibility of their academic work.

Feedback from the publisher 

Figure 11. Screengrab of manual ORCID entry for co-authors to copy, 16 Feb 2026.

Figure 12. Screenshot of adding handle.net entry to manual Academia.edu record, 16 Feb 2026.

Cannot get (a) Kudos (addition)

Figure 13. Screenshot of Kudos search options - DOI, text search & ORCID, 16 Feb 2026.

Who is responsible for submitting to Crossref?

The primary responsibility for submitting and maintaining Crossref entries typically lies with the publisher in being formal Crossref members. CRIMSA publishes Acta Criminologica : African Journal of Criminology & Victimology. The editor ensures that high-quality metadata (such as ORCIDs and funding info) is received from authors before manuscript approval. CRIMSA is then responsible for submitting accepted articles' bibliographic metadata (including URLs and references, registering DOIs), then ensuring this information remains updated. The publisher handles the technical side of generating "Crossref XML" files, or using deposit tools.

Like many small organisations though, CRIMSA's office bearers may be stretched across many roles. So, not able to prioritise learning how to do Crossref submissions as a new responsibility, let alone find the time to do them. Funds to pay for such work may also not be available.

In the near future, CRIMSA's academic journal does plan to submit metadata to Crossref for new articles. I have encouraged Acta Criminologica's editor to organise that its full archive becomes retroactively registered with Crossref. The estimated cost of $0.15 per article’s uploaded meta-data should hopefully not prove a showstopper. Supplying the correct metadata for all articles will benefit this journal's visibility, and hopefully support not just its altmetrics results being listed, but also Acta Criminologica being listed on journal portals used to rank and compare academic journals (and country-level scientific output), such as the free Scimagojr and Scilit portals.

In The regime of ‘post-truth’: COVID-19 and the politics of knowledge (at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01596306.2021.1965544), Kwok, Singh and Heimans (2019) describe how the global health crisis of COVID-19 presents a fertile ground for exploring the complex division of knowledge labour in a ‘post-truth’ era. Kwok et al. (2019) illustrates this by describing COVID-19 knowledge production at university. Our paper focuses on the relationships between health communication, public health policy and recommended medical interventions.

Divisions of knowledge labour are described for (1) the ‘infodemic/disinfodemic research agenda’, (2) ‘mRNA vaccine research’ and (3) ‘personal health responsibility’. We argue for exploring intra- and inter relationships between influential knowledge development fields. In particular, the vaccine manufacturing pharmaceutical companies that drive and promote mRNA knowledge production. Within divisions of knowledge labour (1-3), we identify key inter-group contradictions between the interests of agencies and their contrasting goals. Such conflicts are useful to consider in relation to potential gaps in the WHO’s infodemic research agenda:

For (1), a key contradiction is that infodemic scholars benefit from health authority funding may face difficulties questioning their “scientific” guidance. We flag how the WHO ’s advice for managing COVID-19 departed markedly from a 2019 review of evidence it commissioned (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35444988).

(2)’s division features very different contradictions. Notably, the pivotal role that pharmaceutical companies have in generating vaccine discourse is massively conflicted. Conflict of interest arises in pursuing costly research on novel mRNA vaccines because whether the company producing these therapies will ultimately benefit financially from the future sales of these therapies depends entirely on the published efficacy and safety results from their own research. The division of knowledge labour for (2) mRNA vaccine development should not be considered separately from COVID-19’s in Higher Education or the (1) infodemic research agenda. Multinational pharmaceutical companies direct the research agenda in academia and medical research discourse through the lucrative grants they distribute. Research organisations dependant on external funding for covering budget shortfalls will be more susceptible to the influence of those funders on their research programs.

We spotlight the overwhelming evidence for the importance of (3) personal responsibility. In the COVID-19 pandemic, its discourses seemed largely ignored by Higher Education leadership and government. We flag how contradictions in (3)’s division of knowledge labour in a pandemic can explain such neglect. Personal responsibility is not a commercial site for generating large profits, some of which may be donated in supporting academic research. Research into effective, low-cost interventions seems to be at odds with the economic interests of both grant recipients and Big Pharma donors. Replacing costly treatments with low-cost alternatives would not only greatly diminish the profitability of existing funders, but also reduce the pool of new ones, plus the size of future donations. It is also important to reflect on how else the scientific enterprise at university lends itself to being an arena for misinformation. New information in science that refutes existing dogma does not become accepted immediately. Therefore a period exists when new ideas will be considered as misinformation especially by those with an agenda to suppress its acceptance.

However, from the perspective of orthodoxy, views that support new paradigms are unverified knowledge (and potentially "misinformation"). Any international health organisation that wishes to be an evaluator must have the scientific expertise for managing this ongoing ‘paradox’, or irresolvable contradiction. Organisations such as the WHO may theoretically be able to convene such knowledge, but their dependency on funding from conflicted parties would normally render them ineligible to perform such a task. This is particularly salient where powerful agents can collaborate across divisions of knowledge labour for establishing an institutional oligarchy. Such hegemonic collaboration can suppress alternative viewpoints that contest and query powerful agents’ interests.

This paper alerts researchers to a broad range of ‘post-truth’ moments and flags the danger of relying on global health authorities to be the sole custodians of who is allowed to define what comprises an information disorder. Challenges to scientific propaganda from authorities captured by industry should not automatically be (mis-) characterised as low quality or harmful information. Rather, the digital voices of responsible dissenters can be valuable in protecting scientific integrity and public health (for example, @ProfTimNoakes should not be blocked from his Twitter account for expressing dissent!)