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Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

sciencemag.org

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Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#21

Post by elcritch »

waynecochran wrote: post #14
homarp wrote: post #2

The article does not discuss sci-hub unfortunately. list of the 176 vanished is here: https://github.com/njahn82/vanished_journals/blob/master/Dis...

What would be really useful is to know the average citation count of these journals. As someone who hates to see this stuff disappear, there is still a cynical person inside me that knows there are a glut of journals that are often used to bump publishing count for professors trying to get tenure. That cynic inside of me also realizes that a subset of the journal business is a bit of a scam anyway since frequently au…

Not to mention many of these OA journals were only created to scam researchers. They’d create a fake front and pretend they’re a prominent journal. Can’t recall them specifically but there were a few news clips about them a few years back.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#23

Post by isido »

Kednicma wrote: post #4

This sounds like apologia from a big closed publisher (AAAS) explaining why open-access is supposedly bad. See, sometimes open-access journals fold, and when that happens, nobody knows what happens to the articles. But they'd like you to ignore two inconvenient facts: First, that traditional closed publishers effectively lose all articles by default by this metric! And second, that the Internet Archive, itself open-a…

I have been involved in the same projects furthering open access within Finnish universities as the corresponding author has, and I think the aim of the study is not make OA look bad, but to make it better by finding its shortcomings and then fixing them.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#27

Post by cycomanic »

I can't really say this is a bad thing. The number of journals has so massively exploded over the last 20 years that it is pretty much impossible to follow all the literature anymore. I'm not even counting the predatory OA journals (which I think is the majority in the list) but just looking at the big societies and publisher creating ever more journals.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#28

Post by jmmcd »

guerby wrote: post #3

In France we have HAL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Articles_en_Ligne "Hyper Articles en Ligne, generally shortened to HAL, is an open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields." I work at a university and I know library people and management check carefully that every paper we produce is deposited in HAL. Also: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_articles_en_ligne "Depuis…

Yes, and of course we have arXiv and friends, and sci-hub, and researchers' and institutions' own pages.

But all this misses the point a little -- it is not just the articles that should be preserved, but the journal itself, as a collection of articles with metadata (including the fact that it was collected in the journal), records of editorial boards, editorial articles, etc.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#29

Post by jmmcd »

Jaxkr wrote: post #26

Let’s be real here: was anything of value really lost? Any important work was likely cited, paraphrased, or duplicated elsewhere. Anyone disagree?

We don't always know what is important at the time it's published, and there are many examples of this in the literature.

Meanwhile people are working hard to preserve every Commodore 64 game.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#30

Post by hwbehrens »

guerby wrote: post #3

In France we have HAL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Articles_en_Ligne "Hyper Articles en Ligne, generally shortened to HAL, is an open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields." I work at a university and I know library people and management check carefully that every paper we produce is deposited in HAL. Also: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_articles_en_ligne "Depuis…

A similar service, arXiv[0], is used in other fields as well. In fact, the parent study that we're discussing was itself found on arXiv.

However, arXiv is (or aims to be) a supra-national organization. Do you think it is preferable to have an international standard repository for this knowledge like arXiv, a network of federated, national systems such as HAL, or both?

ArXiv has historically sometimes found itself hard-up for funding, so I think that a valid argument could be made for both approaches.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/

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