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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

#31

Post by jmmcd »

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…

Counter-point: we all know that "free" internet services are flaky. Eg many people prefer to pay for email, for reliability. This article introduces the perspective that OA journals are a bit like ad-supported email.

I don't really agree that traditional publishers lose all articles by default by this metric. I think there is some value in a reliable record of the journal itself, as more than the sum of its parts.

Still, my preferred solution for all of this is like JMLR -- very low-cost and open access, and it has reliability by virtue of association with a top university, and prestige by virtue of its editorial board (which becomes self-fulfilling).

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#32

Post by l_matthia »

Aperocky wrote: post #24
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...

A list of 176 but it's an excel file, why?

Dataset is published on Zenodo (as .csv). https://zenodo.org/record/4014076#.X1kj-rexVkw

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#33

Post by LunaSea »

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…

French people using unknown french standards only, news at 20h00.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#34

Post by jszymborski »

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…

It's worth noting that citation counts are an increasingly poor metric of paper quality (and always has been).

There are multiple works to show that the rise of search engine like Google Scholar have meant that researchers are increasingly citing the same papers, because their searches are all returning the same thing.

Meanwhile, there are some "sleeper" papers that are super relevant to a lot of works, offer great insight, but by virtue of their low search ranking, never get cited.

That's not to say there isn't a fair amount of unremarkable research. It's just that it doesn't always correlate with citation count.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#35

Post by ramshorns »

> The authors defined a vanished journal as one that published at least one complete volume as immediate OA, and less than 50% of its content is now available for free online.

Well, this exact definition could have some false positives, like a journal that publishes every third volume as complete open access and keeps the others behind a paywall. But I'm sure they were a bit more careful than it says here.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#37

Post by toxik »

hwbehrens wrote: post #30
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 har…

FYI, arxiv is for the pre-prints, i.e. the papers as they are before peer review and publication in a proper journal. IEEE and friends hold the copyright to the articles after that, and generally do _not_ want you to publish "their" version.

Which is strange, as you paid them to publish your article, that was likely paid for by state funding -- aka tax money. Ah, the academic racket is so beautiful.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#38

Post by waihtis »

LunaSea wrote: post #33
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…

French people using unknown french standards only, news at 20h00.

Your quote prompted me to read the Minitel wikipedia entry, and apparently there was still 10 million monthly connections on it in 2009. Unfortunately it was retired in 2012; would have been interesting to see how it would fare today.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#39

Post by l_matthia »

isido wrote: post #23
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.

Exactly. We don't see OA as the problem. OA solves many issues that exist with traditional publishing and also makes it easier to preserve content in the first place. The problem lies with decreasing library budgets, rising subscription prices, and that preservation services often are not suitable for smaller OA journals.

LOCKSS provides a free option for publishers to join, but only accepts a limited number of OA publishers (https://www.lockss.org/use-lockss/publishers). A couple years ago the PKP launched their preservation service, which we're really excited about as it also offers free preservation (for OJS journals) and would help esp. those smaller journals that otherwise couldn't afford to enroll into preservation schemes.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#40

Post by dmix »

Jerry2 wrote: post #25

This article reminded me to donate to Sci-Hub again. I feel like donating to various archives is some of the best use for my monthly donations budget.

archive.is always seems to be struggling to stay online, they are well deserving too. It's a thankless job trying to work around all of the pushback against archiving, like copyright and whatnot.

Having archives is so important in the legal field and plenty of areas of research.

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