biblatex and non-url friendly DOIs

Question

Wiley seems to be assigning DOIs using some semantic schema of their own for some of their journals. E.g. 10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V.

Such DOIs have two unwanted side-effects when processed by biblatex:

1. They include characters that aren't URL-safe. Biblatex doesn't seem to properly process these DOIs. As a results the produced link in the document doesn't work.
2. The DOI itself is very long, which introduces spaces, making it harder to copy it as text.

Here is the output from the example DOI:

The .bbl contains the DOI verbatim:

\verb{doi}
\verb 10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V
\endverb

So I'd guess that the problem occurs later, probably in the biblatex-hyperref interface.

Is there a way to make these DOIs work with biblatex?

---

Full Example

LaTeX source

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{plex-otf}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{sample.bib}
@article{lynch-jasist01,
  author        = {Lynch, Clifford A.},
  title         = {When documents deceive: Trust and provenance as new factors for information retrieval in a tangled web},
  journal       = {Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology},
  volume        = {52},
  number        = {1},
  pages         = {12--17},
  month         = {11},
  year          = {2000},
  doi           = {10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V},
}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\usepackage{xpatch}
\usepackage[backend=biber,natbib=true,bibstyle=alphabetic,citestyle=alphabetic]{biblatex}
\ExecuteBibliographyOptions{sorting=nyt, sortlocale=auto}
\addbibresource{sample.bib}
\begin{document}
\title{BibLaTeX and weird DOIs}
\maketitle
On StackExchange, there's a
discussion\footnote{\url{https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/558432/}} about
whether DOIs with non URL-safe characters (e.g. \autocite{lynch-jasist01})
are properly handled by BibLaTeX.
\printbibliography[title=References]
\end{document}

Software used

• LaTeX: This is LuaTeX, Version 1.10.0 (TeX Live 2019)
• biber: biber version: 2.14
• Viewers: Preview 10.1(MacOS Mojave), Skim 1.5.11

Answer 1

It does not exactly answer your question but you might still be interested in what follows. Indicating explicitly DOI (long or short) is not really useful for the reader. What matters is a clickable link that points to the cited document. The idea is then to have the word "DOI" clickable with the actual DOI as the underlying link. One way to achieve this is to use the addendum field in your .bib entry where you insert the \href{actual link}{clickable term} command:

@article{Clifford2001,
author = {Lynch, Clifford A.},
title = {When documents deceive: Trust and provenance as new factors for information retrieval in a tangled web},
journal = {Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology},
volume = {52},
number = {1},
pages = {12-17},
ddoi = {10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V},
year = {2001},
addendum = {\href{https://doi.org/10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V}{DOI}}
}

Note that I have modified the doi field into ddoi so that it is ignored during compilation. An even better solution would be to keep the original .bib entry:

@article{Clifford2001,
author = {Lynch, Clifford A.},
title = {When documents deceive: Trust and provenance as new factors for information retrieval in a tangled web},
journal = {Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology},
volume = {52},
number = {1},
pages = {12-17},
doi = {10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V},
year = {2001},
}

and ask biblatex to achieve the above during compilation but I do not know how.

Answer 2

In my tests both your entry as well as the entry sigfridsson from biblatex-examples.bib worked well for linking in several PDF Viewers on Windows 10 (Sumatra PDF, Adobe Reader, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, ...) as well as for copy-and-pasting (minus the line break).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{plex-otf}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=alphabetic]{biblatex}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{lynch,
  author  = {Lynch, Clifford A.},
  title   = {When Documents Deceive:
             Trust and Provenance as New Factors
             for Information Retrieval in a Tangled Web},
  journal = {Journal of the American Society
             for Information Science and Technology},
  volume  = {52},
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {12-17},
  doi     = {10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V},
  year    = {2001},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\autocite{lynch, sigfridsson}
\printbibliography[title=References]
\end{document}

There are some known issues with certain viewers on MacOS, see https://github.com/latex3/hyperref/issues/110 and Revtex. Some DOI links broken with longbibliography. As far as I can see the consensus there is that this is a bug in those viewers and not a LaTeX issue.

---

It may help to escape some of the special characters in DOIs as recommended in https://www.doi.org/doi_handbook/2_Numbering.html.

If you still want to display the unescaped DOI, some trickery is needed.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{plex-otf}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=alphabetic]{biblatex}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps{
    \map{
      \step[fieldsource=doi]
      \step[fieldset=verba, origfieldval]
      \step[fieldsource=doi, match=\regexp{\x{28}}, replace=\regexp{\x{25}28}]
      \step[fieldsource=doi, match=\regexp{\x{29}}, replace=\regexp{\x{25}29}]
      \step[fieldsource=doi, match=\regexp{\x{3C}}, replace=\regexp{\x{25}3C}]
      \step[fieldsource=doi, match=\regexp{\x{3E}}, replace=\regexp{\x{25}3E}]
    }
  }
}
\DeclareFieldFormat{doi}{%
  \mkbibacro{DOI}\addcolon\space
  \ifhyperref
    {\href{https://doi.org/#1}{\nolinkurl{\thefield{verba}}}}
    {\nolinkurl{\thefield{verba}}}}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{lynch,
  author  = {Lynch, Clifford A.},
  title   = {When Documents Deceive:
             Trust and Provenance as New Factors
             for Information Retrieval in a Tangled Web},
  journal = {Journal of the American Society
             for Information Science and Technology},
  volume  = {52},
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {12-17},
  doi     = {10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V},
  year    = {2001},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\autocite{lynch, sigfridsson}
\printbibliography[title=References]
\end{document}

---

Unpleasant line breaks are of course always an issue. biblatex has some options to tweak URL and DOI line breaking, see Line breaks of long URLs in biblatex bibliography? and BibLaTeX long URL extending into border despite using biburllcpenalty. A simple solution might be loading the xurl package, which allows line breaks in URLs everywhere.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{plex-otf}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=alphabetic]{biblatex}
\usepackage{xurl}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{lynch,
  author  = {Lynch, Clifford A.},
  title   = {When Documents Deceive:
             Trust and Provenance as New Factors
             for Information Retrieval in a Tangled Web},
  journal = {Journal of the American Society
             for Information Science and Technology},
  volume  = {52},
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {12-17},
  doi     = {10.1002/1532-2890(2000)52:1<12::AID-ASI1062>3.0.CO;2-V},
  year    = {2001},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\autocite{lynch, sigfridsson}
\printbibliography[title=References]
\end{document}