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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

#61

Post by guerby »

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…

HAL proposes to authors automatic transfer to a few open archives:

"Transfert automatique des documents vers une archive ouverte internationale telle qu'ArXiv ou Pubmed Central "

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#62

Post by at-fates-hands »

vram22 wrote: post #49
thaumasiotes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They changed their policy back in 2017:

However, almost 12 years of tweets is still very cool. A LOT of startups probably had quite a bit of material in those early days of social media.

But today, the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and "big if true"s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets "on a very selective basis."

The library says it began archiving tweets "for the same reason it collects other materials — to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people." The archive stretches back to Twitter's beginning, in 2006.

The institution says it will continue to preserve its collection of tweets from the platform's first 12 years, but indicates that it has yet to figure out exactly how to make the archive public.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/26/573609499...

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#63

Post by BelleOfTheBall »

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…

I'm astonished there's not an equivalent for this literally everywhere. Even if some articles seem not terribly important at the moment, as progress marches on many could become relevant again and losing access to those is simply inexcusable.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#64

Post by acomjean »

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…

the US for medical/biology papers "The National Center for Biotechnology Information" NCBI. They store papers/ abstracts in a service called pubmed,

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

It works pretty well. Papers are submitted. The get a unique id. Some are stored and accessible. (Some US funding sources require public accessible papers.).

NCBI has a ton of information. Its a pretty awesome resource. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

They even index the paper submitted with a controlled vocabulary of terms (within a month or two) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#65

Post by mattkrause »

BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #63
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…

I'm astonished there's not an equivalent for this literally everywhere. Even if some articles seem not terribly important at the moment, as progress marches on many could become relevant again and losing access to those is simply inexcusable.

There (mostly) is.

Work funded by the NIH needs to end up in PubMed Central within a year of publication. The NSF and DoE have similar policies. Unclassified DoD-funded work also needs to end up in the Defense Technical Information Center. All of this flows from a 2013 memo by John Holdren/OST entitled "Increasing Access to Results of Federally Funded Science", and, as far as I know, it hasn't been overturned. While this doesn't formally cover everything, it comes pretty close and many journals now handle this automatically.

The memo is here: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/02/22/increas...

Canada has a similar policy for Tri-Council funded research (here: http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_F6765465.htm...) but does not require specific repositories.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#66

Post by dan-robertson »

I feel like a lot of this article is trying to make comparisons between online only open access journals and traditional closed publishers. However the paper the article is based on does not collect any data about the latter and so there isn’t any real comparison to make.

I don’t think the solution is to move back towards the old model. There are already lots of initiatives towards creating online archives of academic work that may be piggybacked on. In mathematics, perhaps the easiest way to set up an open access journal is as an arxiv overlay journal where at the most basic level each issue of the journal is a list of links to specific versions of papers on the arxiv. This would be likely to be archived sufficiently well.

For a traditional journal that shuts down to be archived, lots of things need to happen:

1. Some library needs to pay some exorbitant fee to get physical or (permanent not saas-based) digital copies of the journal

2. That library needs to keep hold of that copy for the 100 years or so until copyright expires

3. That library then needs to take the initiative to make its copies available

This seems like a harder process than finding some public domain digital copy. And for a lot of journals, the only reason the library gets copies is due to the bundling systems which universities hate.

I’m curious to know more about these journals which did vanish, and what sort of quality they are. If a predatory journal offers open access and later disappears, would they be counted?

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#67

Post by bnewbold »

At the Internet Archive, we are working on this exact problem, and have been in communication with the pre-print's authors. We have built open infrastructure (open source, open data) tracking "preservation coverage", for example:

https://fatcat.wiki/coverage/search?q=is_oa%3Atrue+year%3A%3...

and are working to improve crawling. There is a "save paper now" feature, as well as an API for bots. Organizations like DOAJ, ISSN, DOI registrars (Crossref, Datacite, others) are crucial for this. In the broader ecosystem, we hope this can complement existing efforts that partner with large publishers (like LOCKSS, Portico, JSTOR) and institutional repositories. A natural niche for us is web-native (HTML) content, which we have crawled a lot of but are just getting started to index. For example, publications like d-lib, first monday, and distill.pub.

If folks want to help, it would be great to have a "youtube-dl for open access papers". There is a lot of content on large platforms and publishers which have anti-crawling measures (even for gold OA and hybrid content!), as well as a long tail of small publishers that don't use simple/common mechanisms like OAI-PMH and the `citation_pdf_url` HTML meta tag to identify fulltext content. The OAI-PMH ecosystem sadly is not very complete or helpful for the use case of mirroring.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#68

Post by esfandia »

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.

Shouldn't university libraries be that public utility?

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#69

Post by mattkrause »

acomjean wrote: post #64
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…

the US for medical/biology papers "The National Center for Biotechnology Information" NCBI. They store papers/ abstracts in a service called pubmed, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov It works pretty well. Papers are submitted. The get a unique id. Some are stored and accessible. (Some US funding sources require public accessible papers.). NCBI has a ton of information. Its a pretty awesome resource. https://www.ncbi.nl…

Nearly all federally-funded (and unclassified) research needs to be publicly accessible, as per a 2013 policy memo.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#70

Post by Ma8ee »

random_visitor wrote: post #55
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.

Why would the universities mind having their work circulated for free? They don't make any money from the current system, but pay exorbitant fees for journal subscriptions.
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