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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

#41

Post by umlautae »

jszymborski wrote: post #34
waynecochran wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

To possibly find “sleeper” papers check out the “show similar” feature of this arXiv mirror on condensed matter physics. https://cond-mat.abbrivia.com Search for some keywords and then surf by “show similar” on relevant articles.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#43

Post by nurbl »

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?

Part of the point of citing another article is that you don't then have to repeat all of it. So if B is cited by A, and B is no longer available, it's not really possible to read and understand A either. And likely A used information in B to justify some claim, which is now weaker.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#44

Post by hpfr »

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.

Ironically, the French time format is best in my opinion, because some operating systems and services can’t handle colons in file names. ISO 8601 allows for Thhmmss.sss which can be represented in filenames, but I’d rather use something like 20h33m02.345 because it’s much easier to read at a glance than T203302.345, which looks like one decimal number.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#45

Post by l_matthia »

ramshorns wrote: post #35

> 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.

Yes. We checked that all journals were full OA journals (so nothing like the scenario you just described here). So the timeline looked like this: OA journal was actively publishing > then became inactive, but the content on the journal website was still accessible > and eventually the website and the content disappeared/became inaccessible.

In some cases, we found websites (other than the original journal website) that now host some individual issues, but not all of the content.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#46

Post by l_matthia »

jp1016 wrote: post #10

read an article about waybackmachine , archive.org on hn few days back, will there be a copy on it ?

We found that in some cases, some of the published articles are archived through the Internet Archive! (Yay!) Unfortunately, this doesn't amount to complete issues/volumes and seems to be by chance.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#47

Post by jefft255 »

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?

I disagree, I cite important work all the time and you definitely need the original paper. Paraphrasing isn't really done enough to negate the need for the original paper, otherwise what kind of lame plagiarized paper are you writing? Citations only tell you where to look, and if that article is gone then you're screwed.

What do you mean by "duplicated elsewhere"? Sitting on some scientist's hard drive doesn't count, it has to be discoverable. That's what the issue is: when journals die, how do we ensure that the papers are saved somewhere easily searchable?

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#48

Post by thaumasiotes »

Thlom wrote: post #9
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…

In Norway any publication needs to be deposited to the national archive by law. That includes scientific journals and in theory even small publications distributed in a private setting if it's a big enough group of people (I'm not sure of the details). Not sure how it works for scientific work published in foreign publications, but I assume it's sent to the national archive as routine. However, most of the archive is…

In the US, I believe the Library of Congress fills a similar role.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#49

Post by vram22 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #48
Thlom wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Norway any publication needs to be deposited to the national archive by law. That includes scientific journals and in theory even small publications distributed in a private setting if it's a big enough group of people (I'm not sure of the details). Not sure how it works for scientific work published in foreign publications, but I assume it's sent to the national archive as routine. However, most of the archive is…

In the US, I believe the Library of Congress fills a similar role.

IIRC, some years back I read that the Library even had a full archive of all of Twitter, up to that date at least.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#50

Post by physicsguy »

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…

In the UK we have to deposit with the institution you were working/studying at. It's a bit annoying as there's no central place to deposit.
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