Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

guest · Sep 10, 2020

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps
September 10, 2020
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/open_access_journal/

Academics studying the longevity of online scholarship say that 176 digital open-access journals have vanished from the internet over the past two decades.

The findings are documented in a research paper distributed via ArXiv, "Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals."
Open access journals, as the term suggests, are made accessible to internet users at no charge, in contrast to traditional subscription-based journals.
Click to expand...

The issue surfaced last year when the University of California terminated its subscription with scientific publishing giant Elsevier over the price it demanded for access to its collection of more than 2,000 journals. The UC system wants Elsevier to provide open access publishing for UC-authored articles and to provide UC scholars with access to journal content at a reasonable price. Negations remain ongoing.

The restrictions and costs imposed by traditional academic publishers like Elsevier led Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan in 2011 to found Sci-Hub, a website that shares research papers at no cost and with no regard for US copyright law.
Click to expand...

Kahle said the Internet Archive has been crawling the web for 25 years but started focusing on academic periodicals in 2018. The Mellon Foundation, he said, gave the Internet Archive a grant along these lines in 2019.

"So we are now crawling long tail journal literature and also datasets as they are available on the web," he said, "We are geared up significantly because of these grants, and frankly the discoveries we have made about how much support the Commons needs."
Bryan Newbold of the Internet Archive said that by the Internet Archive's analysis, "18 per cent of all open access articles since 1945, over three million, are not independently archived by us or another preservation organization, other than the publishers themselves."
Click to expand...

arXiv: Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals
(PDF - 768 KB): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.11933

We found 176 OA journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the web between 2000-2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world. Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge. We encourage those interested in the phenomenon of vanished journals to use the public dataset for their own research.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

guest Guest

Log in or Sign up

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

guest Guest

Useful Searches