Transferring Journals from one Publisher to Another

I've just finished a project for a client that showed, among other things, the weaknesses of publishers' procedures when a title moves from one publisher to another. Specifically, the digital object identifier (DOI) may break. This is a bad thing, of course, as DOIs were invented to solve the widespread problem of broken links. A DOI should be a persistent identifier, and a publisher using DOIs agrees to maintain a central repository of those links--that work.

Project Transfer, launched in April by the UK Serials Group (UKSG) and endorsed by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), is attempting to address these issues. Project Transfer is currently recruiting an advisory board to review guidelines.