Dozens of Scientific Journals Have Vanished From the Internet, and No One Preserved Them (sciencemag.org) 81
Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 2 decades as publishers stopped maintaining them, potentially depriving scholars of useful research findings, a study has found. From a report: An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at risk of vanishing because they are inactive, says a preprint posted on 3 September on the arXiv server. The number of OA journals tripled from 2009 to 2019, and on average the vanished titles operated for nearly 10 years before going dark, which "might imply that a large number ... is yet to vanish," the authors write. The study didn't identify examples of prominent journals or articles that were lost, nor collect data on the journals' impact factors and citation rates to the articles. About half of the journals were published by research institutions or scholarly societies; none of the societies are large players in the natural sciences. None of the now-dark journals was produced by a large commercial publisher.
Luckily, those were "open access" journals... (Score:2)
Now consider the non-open-access journals that vanished - those cause an actual loss of information, because even the author has no right for publication elsewhere.
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the "closed access" ones get money so they also print them on paper. there is no problem.
Hilarious people talk about digital information storage a century from now, the internet loves to forget. if the supply of hard drives gets pinched enough everything will be fucked.
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How many paper copies of 100 year old journals do you have?
The only reason there's "no problem" for paper is because of a massive investment for libraries to preserve paper materials. They spend far more than they would have to spend to keep (and maintain) their own digital copies of things.
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I have 100+ year old books and periodicals in my collection. Paper is a highly durable medium for long-term storage of information. What's your point?
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That's fair. The only stuff worth keeping has been traditional peer-reviewed journals (several of which are still in existence).
Sorting out (for veracity) the sheer quantity of information we need to process for modern life is quite the trick.
Wish I had some answers, but all I've got is persistence.
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That's good. You know the digital media of 30-40 years ago sheds oxides and coming up with drives and drivers is hard...
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Some of us spent our working life in places where the internet access got as good as a 2MBPS link shared between a hundred users simultaneously, and got into the habit of always keeping a copy of everything you read even a part of (and keeping it more-or-less sensibly indexed/ organised). It's only a terabyte or two - not really a big problem to store, more of a problem of organisation and maintenance.
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Yes good thing they were printed on paper where they will be accessible and safe forever.
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I only accept clay tablets for long term archiving. It has historical precedence.
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copies of acid-free paper in a multitude of places lasts a while. I have books from 150 years ago in shelf next to me.
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Those books were just lucky to have never been hit by a fire or natural disaster. Acid-free paper won't help with that. Meanwhile, the contents of Aaron Swartz' JSTOR torrent could survive anything short of a sudden planetary-scale catastrophe, or maybe more if we burn it to an M-DISC and leave a copy on the moon.
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the "closed access" ones get money so they also print them on paper. there is no problem.
In my field (astrophysics) most of the "closed access" major journals have transitioned to online only as well.
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Some still do the paper thing in addition to online. Stuff disappears from the web, I've noticed in the last 30 years. The Internet Archive isn't allowed to crawl and save it all.
Are they not in the Internet Archive? (Score:3)
If they were open-access, they shouldn't have been behind a paywall or login that would prevent them being archived.
What's the story?
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IA is a small non-profit, small in the sense they are not like heavyweights that can raise billions in cash (and pay lavish salaries, squadrons of private jets for staff). There is only so much IA can archive given sheer numbers of journals along with other stuff.
I remember some years ago a discussion at IA about there is no long term digital storage solution. Various methods can store data for a number of years but eventually those systems will lose data (i.e. oxides on harddrives as iggymanz points out)
Like Alexandria all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
While the Library at Alexandria was destroyed several times for various reasons, the knowledge it contained of the ancient world was nonetheless lost. Even seemingly insignificant writings of unknown scholars or lecturers would have advanced our present day knowledge.
Instead, we are left wondering what we're missing. As the digital age moves relentlessly forward, the same disappearance of knowledge will leave future generations wondering what they're missing.
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Data storage is inherently leaky. Trying to make it non-leaky is a snark hunt. Entropy works.
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When they open a time capsule and see a newspaper on the top with the big issues of the day, everyone wants to read the ads and other little junk for a better picture.
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Someone doesn't understand the concept, as there are multiple funding models. The one for the Public Library of Science, for instance... [wikipedia.org]
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Lol. Those aren't hippie journals. They're the worst of the cutthroat capitalist assholes. They charge a couple thousand dollars for sticking a couple megabyte PDF on the web. To be fair, I'm sure it costs them a bit more to send the insane amounts of spam.
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WTF? English not your first language?
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Perhaps it's his reading comprehension, or more likely his fragile ego is not used to someone questioning what he says. A real "legend in his own mind" type.
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I am. Perhaps it's your reading comprehension that's at fault? Or maybe some kind of insane bias? I didn't imply in any way that I valued papers on a megabyte basis.
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When you read aloud (as I am sure it is the only way you can comprehend the written words) do you even listen to yourself? The bias is clearly the only thing occupying the volume between your ears.
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Look, you obviously jumped to some crazy conclusion. I'm trying to figure out why. By the way, you're the one who started the assholishness with "What kind of a simpleton are you".
Are you maybe under the impression that open access journals are charging for the science, and their price is justified because the science is so valuable? They *charge* the people who do the research. Their high prices are *paid* by the people who actually do the science.
If I want to stick a few gigabytes on the internet for year
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Incidentally, I am well aware how journals work---OA or otherwise. So, don't presume to lecture me about how they work. I've been doing this for a very long time (PhD in 1984). After working at various labs I hav
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Ad hominem attacks: International sign of trolls everywhere.
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I agree. CHR$(36)'s ad hominem attack was unfounded, unjustified, and pretty assholish.
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These journals are a racket. They don't create the content, you have to pay to submit an article, they are reviewed by unpaid volunteers, then you have to pay again to access them. The cost of hosting the couple MB PDF file is one of the few actual costs these journals have.
study subjects risks (Score:3)
Being part of a study imposes a risk, often minute, but still.
For this clear conventions exist regarding their protection and rights.
Simply put, thou shalt not impose a risk on a subject for a study in vein. It should be studied adequately, a study must have a relevant possible outcome and thou shalt publish the results. EVEN IF NO RELEVANT OUTCOME IS FOUND.
Now thousands of subject risked something, for nothing.
Re:study subjects risks (Score:5, Funny)
Simply put, thou shalt not impose a risk on a subject for a study in vein.
This is why ethical scientists only perform their studies on arteries.
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i see what you did there.
very funny.
Re: study subjects risks (Score:1)
Would this be a parody of A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Or Bram Stoker's Dracula?
All on Arxiv (Score:4)
I'd be shocked if these papers weren't still easily available on arxiv or on the scholar's personal websites. Sure, they might eventually disappear but how often do we now look at no name studies from the 30s? I don't really see this as a, particularly serious problem. Surely it's less important than the publication bias concerns at many of the top journals.
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Not as often as I would if they were available as open access PDFs. It's hard enough to find stuff from the 60s, although I have got lucky with some papers from the 50s.
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If only there was someone who did something (Score:1, Flamebait)
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The US Legal system drove him to suicide, not the university.
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Both parties cooperated to drive him to suicide.
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Fewer humanities journals (Score:2)
What about the 5th law of library science? (Score:2)
"Fifth Law: The library must be a growing organism"
It's kinda their job to preserve documents.
impact factor (Score:1)
Is this the 'Age of Information', then? (Score:2)
Or is only the shitty, banal, 'curated', 'commercial' 'information' worth preserving?
After all, aren't we (humans) anti-science, now? If it was 'information' about UFOs, spirits, ghosts, religion, magic, conspiracy theories, etc, it'd be backed up in a hundred different places?
But some shitty 'science' nonsense, all lies meant to control us, that just falls by the wayside?
Yes, I'm being as sharp-toothed sarcastic as possible here. I'm tired of humans being stupid and waste
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Were the journals indexed anywhere? Or cited? (Score:4, Informative)
As others have pointed out, the PIs who published in these journals should have the final published versions of their articles to distribute as well, but whether they want to do that is their own choice.
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Even having the articles that are fake can be of importance to show a link between industry groups and the researchers that promote their interests.
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Even having the articles that are fake can be of importance to show a link between industry groups and the researchers that promote their interests.
I wouldn't necessarily jump out to call the journals - or the articles in them - fake. Some of them may have been but some journals are started in part because publishing costs are obscene. I recently published in a journal that few people here have likely ever heard of - and likely even fewer here on slashdot will ever read - and the "discounted" publishing rate was over $1,600. I've heard that publishing in Science or Nature is even more expensive (for that matter the base rate for the journal my pape
National libraries? (Score:3)
Why don't these projects just send the texts to their national libraries? This seem like a problem that was solved many generations ago.
How much is really lost? (Score:2, Troll)
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That reminds me of Alan Sokal and his fashionable nonsense submission! TFF
What were the impact rankings of the lost archives (Score:1)
That should be the main factor at play.
There are a LOT of "pay for" and more than a few "open" publishers that simply put, publish junk under the guise of science. This is where you find the likes of homeopathy, the latest fad, the more extreme examples of the grievance studies and so on that all rely on conclusions with little to no scientific rigor.
Losing these extremely low quality "noise" publications is literally almost no loss, as you're largely improving the signal of actual scientific research to t
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Does this mean we lose the paper, "Cisgender Politics and its Effects on Underwater Lesbian Basket Weaving" forever?
Say it isn't so!
Check Sci-Hub (Score:2)
Those thieves probably have copies.
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Hooray for arXiv (Score:2)
Archive.org ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember Aaron Schwartz ? (Score:2, Troll)
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No big loss (Score:2)
Nobody ever reads those things. The only people who did skimmed them so they could find something to use as a citation in their own equally dry and verbose paper.
Were the journals worth preserving? (Score:4, Informative)
As I always said: We live in the digital dark ages (Score:1)
Thanks, Content Mafia!
Worse fates (Score:5, Interesting)
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I stopped renewing my IEEE membership when the incessant ads for life insurance and other irrelevant crap got too bad.
web archive (Score:1)