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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

#111

Post by harlanji »

bnewbold wrote: post #67

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,…

I have a raspi1 that I tether to my phone with a script called download-video that wraps youtube-dl... I try to archive anything I consume before I consume it now. Maybe a little raspi image for researchers to behave like that could help. $100 archive setup, naturally it’s harder to use than most apps, I use Termius Premium for SSH + SFTP (share integration is nice) and run a screen session. IG same handle for photos and screenshots. The mirroring story is static gen + cqrs + cdn. I do this in my spare time, would like to do it in some sustainable capacity. New app studio for hire, basically. Patreon same handle for a little history. Email in profile, I don’t use other DMs.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#112

Post by HelloNurse »

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…

Even the most worthless articles and the worst pay-to-publish scam journals should be preserved as historical documentation and negative references.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#113

Post by torgian »

cxr wrote: post #94
bnewbold wrote: post #67

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,…

> If folks want to help, it would be great to have a "youtube-dl for open access papers". Zotero has an existing set of "translators". And somewhat related to this request: I scratched out some notes last year about how to get more out of "zero-obligation communities" (like the pool of prospective contributors in open source) " rel="nofollow">https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan... . The long…

When does it become a prerequisite to eradicate meat bags and replace them with cold, calculating droi.... uh, code?

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#114

Post by dr-detroit »

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.

Oh jeez. That's where all my money went. GREAT. Now we have an archive of bots marketing trash to bots.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#116

Post by thaw13579 »

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.

Aside from the question of being lawful, I don't think they quite fit the bill alone for a few other reasons. First, they are not truly public or accountable to the scientific community -- while they accept uploads, they are both designed and managed by unaccountable private parties. Second, they do not maintain much in the way of metadata, making it hard to verify basic details such as the publication date, authorship, and revision history.

This second points is important for having a coherent discussion of the literature and avoiding fraud to some degree, and to their credit, the major journals do provide this (but not the first point). In this sense, I think Pubmed Central is an example of a good way towards a public utility model:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#117

Post by thaw13579 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #57
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.

Pubmed Central is a archival system made by NIH that is an example of this kind of public model:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/

Most NIH funded work is required to be deposited there, but at present, some journals place an embargo on new papers, giving them a year before they are available on PMC.

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#118

Post by amirkdv »

thaw13579 wrote: post #117
CydeWeys wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pubmed Central is a archival system made by NIH that is an example of this kind of public model: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/ Most NIH funded work is required to be deposited there, but at present, some journals place an embargo on new papers, giving them a year before they are available on PMC.

Yes! Pubmed is great and the backbone of a lot of downstream work (e.g. literature mining), but only has the abstracts and is limited to bio/med (the NIH mandate).

AFAIK the problem that the OP points out would not have been fixed by Pubmed. It would keep the abstracts, but the full contents would become dead links because the publishers _own_ the full article at the end of the day (which is absurd IMO).

Re: Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

#119

Post by amirkdv »

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.

I agree and both these two projects are remarkable contributions.

My point was admittedly an aspirational one that requires major changes to the current IP ownership model of (often publicly funded) scholarly work. For example: see how publishers have used the legal system to throw the book at projects like sci-hub or individuals like aaronsw.

I do disagree that the main issue is universities not being keen on having their work circulated openly.

My take is this:

1. Publishers used to have a reasonable value prop, but are now basically robbing the public blind.

2. University admin roles, even at public universities, are more and more occupied by metric-obsessed, run-it-like-a-business types leading to:

3. Academics are stuck on the publish-or-perish hamster wheel that is fueled by a vague amorphous notion of journal prestige, set up and profited by said publishers.

I can't see how we can fundamentally change this situation without either of:

- top-down structural change in academic admin system allowing people to pursue academic careers without h-index and citation obsessions. Major tenure reform?

- bottom-up mobilization of academics or public interest groups, forcing publishers' hands into a more sane (and less profitable) business model. They will fight it tooth and nail of course, hence the need for mass coordinated action (boycotts, public shaming, etc.)

Both these avenues need playing politics on one level or another.

EDIT: formatting and clearer wording.

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