I come across various errors at publishers’ websites, and post about them as they crop up.
The latest examples are from Springer. Usually, Springer are quite good, but they have recently made changes to their websites which will seriously inconvenience thousands of their users.
For a start, they have changed all, or nearly all, of their RSS feeds. If you used to subscribe to the feed for Reviews in Endocrine & Metabolic Disorders, for example, which used to be at http://www.springerlink.com/content/104970?sortorder=asc&export=rss then it won’t work anymore in feed readers. The same goes for more than 2,000 other Springer journal feeds!
The new feed for Reviews in Endocrine & Metabolic Disorders is http://link.springer.com/search.rss?facet-content-type=Article&facet-journal-id=11154&channel-name=Reviews%20in%20Endocrine%20and%20Metabolic%20Disorders But wait! They now call that journal: Reviews in Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders.
What happened to the ‘&’ that was used last week?
The Springer page for the journal: Infectious Diseases of Poverty has a link at the bottom to: About This Journal. What do you find when you click on that link today?
Elsewhere, there are other inconsistencies in the way they treat journal titles, for example:
ATZautotechnology
ATZextra
ATZproduktion worldwide
but:
ATZ – Automobiltechnische Zeitschrift
According to The HUGO Journal website, this is an Open Access journal published under the SpringerOpen brand. On that page it states: SpringerOpen journals are fully and immediately open acces…
But wait! At this Springer website for the same journal, you are expected to pay for some articles, e.g. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11568-011-9156-3 So is it an OA journal, or is it not OA?
What about European Physical Journal E ? How does that page fit in with this website and also this website? At the EPJ portal website (that’s the middle one of those last three sites), there’s a statement about Open Access, so why are there charges for articles at the first of those three sites? I’m confused.
The journal Reproduktionsmedizin seems to have ceased in 2003 (I’m not sure, because the About This Journal page for that journal goes to another An error occurred page), but assuming it has ceased, why are you able to subscribe to a feed for new items from this title?
There’s a journal called SpringerPlus but there are two different RSS feeds for SpringerPlus. There’s this one, and there is this one. They currently have different content.
Do you want to know who now publishes The American Journal of Psychoanalysis ? The Springer site for that journal, which Springer published from 1941-2006, tells you:
Well, at least that is more information than you get from this other Springer website for that journal.
Shouldn’t Springer know the current titles of their own journals? It seems that they don’t:
Urolithiasis was previously known as Urological Research. I expect a publisher’s website to tell me that fact, and not to have to search elsewhere for correct information.
Above is another error, currently found here. What is the title of the journal? Forest Science and Practice, as per the graphic, or Forestry Studies in China as per the description?
What a mess!
I read here that Springer’s profit in 2010 was £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%
The biggest mess however, in my opinion, is the fact that all the previously available RSS feeds no longer work.
Roddy Macleod's Blog 
It’s the modern affliction – constant tinkering. Managers need to keep changing things just to feel they’re being effective.
Five days ago, I contacted Springer’s customer relations about the problems. So far, nothing in response. I suppose that now I’ll have to blog about the lack of response. Some of the changes at the Springer website seem to be for technical reasons. There are all sorts of 404s, now.