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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

#51

Post by amirkdv »

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?

Yes, disagree.

1. The importance of a piece of scholarly work need not be immediately apparent to its contemporaries.

2. Being cited is a poor proxy for importance.

3. Work that is cited is rarely paraphrased or duplicated in a meaningful way.

4. Paraphrased citations are a poor proxy for canonical source; papers are often cited incompletely or sometimes outright inaccurately.

5. These are the fruits of people's labour. They spent days and months producing them. To lose them, especially when digital copies are so cheap, is an unnecessary disregard for said labour.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#52

Post by mturmon »

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…

AAAS is a non-profit, and Science subscriptions are really cheap — like US$100 for a year of a weekly magazine. They are not money-grubbers, and they are very distinct from Springer, Elsevier, and Nature in this regard.

I think they legit view preservation of the scientific record as within their provenance to cover.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#53

Post by amirkdv »

I think there is a case to be made for a kind of "public utility" infrastructure for the distribution and storage of scholarly work given how

1. cheap it is, considering the size of the institutions that produce and benefit from them.

2. absurdly broken the private publishing industry has become.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#54

Post by Jerry2 »

dmix wrote: post #40
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.

> archive.is always seems to be struggling to stay online

Very good point. I will donate to them too. I've been donating to Archive.org for a long time but I use Archive.is more often these days so they deserve some love too.

I have a list of places where I make donations to on my profile page here.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#55

Post by random_visitor »

amirkdv wrote: post #53

I think there is a case to be made for a kind of "public utility" infrastructure for the distribution and storage of scholarly work given how 1. cheap it is, considering the size of the institutions that produce and benefit from them. 2. absurdly broken the private publishing industry has become.

That exactly what Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are. Assuming, you aren't expecting this public utility to be 100% lawful, since the other parties involved here (universities for instance) don't seem too keen on the idea of a having their work circulate openly.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#56

Post by HenryKissinger »

elcritch wrote: post #21
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…

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.

Can people not try to make a scam out of everything??

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#57

Post by CydeWeys »

amirkdv wrote: post #53

I think there is a case to be made for a kind of "public utility" infrastructure for the distribution and storage of scholarly work given how 1. cheap it is, considering the size of the institutions that produce and benefit from them. 2. absurdly broken the private publishing industry has become.

I'm surprised that this doesn't exist already. There's many hundreds of open access journals already, yet they're not standardized on one internetworked system? They're all implementing the basics of a PDF repository independently, and poorly? Why??

Take arXiv and expand its scope and upload everything there. Boom, problem effectively solved using mostly existing tools.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#59

Post by jumelles »

ghaff wrote: post #8
pintxo wrote: post #6

The predigital and national solution are laws requiring a a copy to be sent to the national library. What's the digital, and post-national solution?

In the US, the mandatory deposit requirement likely worked pretty well with traditional book/magazine publishers and music labels. Outside of that, I expect a huge amount slipped through the cracks. There's no real enforcement AFAIK and I imagine most who are independently publishing or otherwise working outside of conventional channels don't deposit.

It's not mandatory and not even a requirement for copyright protection.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#60

Post by guerby »

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.

protocol and metadata in HAL follows OAI-PMH: Open Archives Initiative - Protocol Metadata Harvesting

https://www.openarchives.org/pmh/

With a very long list of institutions following the same standard.

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