[HN Gopher] Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the...
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Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 298 points
Date : 2020-09-09 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| ramshorns wrote:
| > 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.
| l_matthia wrote:
| 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.
| bnewbold wrote:
| 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.
| pintxo wrote:
| 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| jumelles wrote:
| It's not mandatory and not even a requirement for copyright
| protection.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's independent of copyright registration.
|
| It is, as far as I can tell, mandatory in theory but not in
| practice. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_depo
| sit.html#:~....
| Thlom wrote:
| In Norway you are required to allow the national library to
| archive your websites, but I assume there's a lot that's
| slipping through the cracks ...
| heldergg wrote:
| Yes, the same applies to newspapers and magazines online. We
| need a law demanding a legal digital deposit at least at the
| national level.
|
| It is somewhat trivial to devise an API to be integrated in the
| publications pipelines to automatically and transparently
| submit new and modified articles to a central repository.
| PeterisP wrote:
| We are not (yet?) living in a post-national world, but the
| simple digital solution is to require a digital copy to be sent
| to the national library, as some nations have done; since
| national libraries in any case are now all heavily working on
| digitizing their pre-digital assets and making them available
| online.
| panic wrote:
| Legalize Sci-Hub.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| > 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.
| homarp wrote:
| The article does not discuss sci-hub unfortunately.
|
| list of the 176 vanished is here:
| https://github.com/njahn82/vanished_journals/blob/master/Dis...
| Aperocky wrote:
| A list of 176 but it's an excel file, why?
| l_matthia wrote:
| Dataset is published on Zenodo (as .csv).
| https://zenodo.org/record/4014076#.X1kj-rexVkw
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Link seems to be broken: fixed version may be
| https://github.com/njahn82/vanished_journals/blob/master/dat...
| waynecochran wrote:
| 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
| authors have to pay the journals to include their paper and
| then the journals charge an exorbitant rate to get access. Have
| you tried to buy a journal article lately ($35 for one paper!)
| -- yeah, neither have I.
| Lagogarda wrote:
| true and true. "Sci journals" are everything but science
| jszymborski wrote:
| 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 insight, but by
| virtue of their low search ranking, never get cited.
|
| That's not to say there isn't a fair amount of unremarkable
| research. It's just that it doesn't always correlate with
| citation count.
| umlautae wrote:
| 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.
| elcritch wrote:
| 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.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Can people not try to make a scam out of everything??
| waynecochran wrote:
| Problem is that almost anything that can be exploited
| eventually will be.
| wrkronmiller wrote:
| I'm getting a 404 at that link, now.
| Jaxkr wrote:
| Let's be real here: was anything of value __really __lost? Any
| important work was likely cited, paraphrased, or duplicated
| elsewhere.
|
| Anyone disagree?
| amirkdv wrote:
| 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.
| jefft255 wrote:
| 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?
| jmmcd wrote:
| We don't always know what is important at the time it's
| published, and there are many examples of this in the
| literature.
|
| Meanwhile people are working hard to preserve every Commodore
| 64 game.
| nurbl wrote:
| 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.
| amirkdv wrote:
| 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.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| 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.
| esfandia wrote:
| Shouldn't university libraries be that public utility?
| random_visitor wrote:
| 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.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > other parties involved here (universities for instance)
| don't seem too keen on the idea of a having their work
| circulate openly
|
| Hum... What?
|
| Universities at worst don't care. Most really want they work
| circulating and will do a lot of things to get it (many
| useless things that miss the point, but well, that's how
| people are).
|
| Universities could push it harder. But they are surely
| pushing on the correct direction.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Universities at worst don't care.
|
| I wonder how aaronsw would feel about this statement.
| [deleted]
| afandian wrote:
| There are archiving schemes in scholarly publishing such as
| LOCKSS and CLOCKSS. Not saying that they apply in this case, but
| YSK.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS
| cycomanic wrote:
| I can't really say this is a bad thing. The number of journals
| has so massively exploded over the last 20 years that it is
| pretty much impossible to follow all the literature anymore. I'm
| not even counting the predatory OA journals (which I think is the
| majority in the list) but just looking at the big societies and
| publisher creating ever more journals.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| On the bright side, 50% of the vanished content was not
| reproducible.
| guerby wrote:
| 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 le 25 septembre 2018, les depots de logiciels sur HAL
| sont connectes a Software Heritage"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Heritage
|
| For recruiting some french institutions like CNRS will only
| consider papers deposited in HAL when doing the evaluation.
| BelleOfTheBall wrote:
| 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.
| mattkrause wrote:
| 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/2
| 016/02/22/increas...
|
| Canada has a similar policy for Tri-Council funded research
| (here: http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_F67654
| 65.htm...) but does not require specific repositories.
| programLyrique wrote:
| Actually, although it is mainly directed to French researchers,
| nothing prevents researchers not based in France to deposit
| their papers there.
| Thlom wrote:
| 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 not publicly accessible due to
| copyright, privacy etc. You can request access to specific
| content both as a private person and as a researcher.
| acomjean wrote:
| 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/
| mattkrause wrote:
| Nearly _all_ federally-funded (and unclassified) research
| needs to be publicly accessible, as per a 2013 policy memo.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| In the US, I believe the Library of Congress fills a similar
| role.
| vram22 wrote:
| IIRC, some years back I read that the Library even had a
| full archive of all of Twitter, up to that date at least.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| 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...
| bnewbold wrote:
| In Latin America, the SciELO network has been very successful
| at providing shared, low-cost, stable infrastructure for
| digital journal hosting using state funding:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciELO
| [deleted]
| jmmcd wrote:
| Yes, and of course we have arXiv and friends, and sci-hub, and
| researchers' and institutions' own pages.
|
| But all this misses the point a little -- it is not just the
| articles that should be preserved, but the journal itself, as a
| collection of articles with metadata (including the fact that
| it was collected in the journal), records of editorial boards,
| editorial articles, etc.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| 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 hard-up for
| funding, so I think that a valid argument could be made for
| both approaches.
|
| [0]: https://arxiv.org/
| guerby wrote:
| 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 "
| toxik wrote:
| FYI, arxiv is for the pre-prints, i.e. the papers as they are
| before peer review and publication in a proper journal. IEEE
| and friends hold the copyright to the articles after that,
| and generally do _not_ want you to publish "their" version.
|
| Which is strange, as you paid them to publish your article,
| that was likely paid for by state funding -- aka tax money.
| Ah, the academic racket is so beautiful.
| tasogare wrote:
| > For recruiting some french institutions like CNRS will only
| consider papers deposited in HAL when doing the evaluation.
|
| While I like HAL in general as a consumer, that policy is
| terrible if true for people like me who started their academic
| career abroad. One more reason not to go back, I guess.
| programLyrique wrote:
| You can add all articles afterwards (even though it can be
| tedious).
|
| There is actually a tool that is supported by HAL that makes
| it easier to quickly add all your publications by just giving
| your name: https://dissem.in/
|
| For instance, it automatically fills in all the metadata for
| your publications.
| tgflynn wrote:
| I would be very surprised if there wasn't some exception for
| papers published abroad. Otherwise they would be potentially
| ignoring a lot of information about candidates.
| [deleted]
| physicsguy wrote:
| 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.
| LunaSea wrote:
| French people using unknown french standards only, news at
| 20h00.
| waihtis wrote:
| Your quote prompted me to read the Minitel wikipedia entry,
| and apparently there was still 10 million monthly connections
| on it in 2009. Unfortunately it was retired in 2012; would
| have been interesting to see how it would fare today.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Such as the metric system
| hpfr wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| It appeals to me as an EE (by training) too. I've
| occasionally slipped a 'PS2k3' or similar and had to
| explain...
| guerby wrote:
| 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.
| peter303 wrote:
| Library of Congress should preserve them.
| Kednicma wrote:
| 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-access, was
| essential to conducting the study in the first place!
| isido wrote:
| I have been involved in the same projects furthering open
| access within Finnish universities as the corresponding author
| has, and I think the aim of the study is not make OA look bad,
| but to make it better by finding its shortcomings and then
| fixing them.
| l_matthia wrote:
| Exactly. We don't see OA as the problem. OA solves many
| issues that exist with traditional publishing and also makes
| it easier to preserve content in the first place. The problem
| lies with decreasing library budgets, rising subscription
| prices, and that preservation services often are not suitable
| for smaller OA journals.
|
| LOCKSS provides a free option for publishers to join, but
| only accepts a limited number of OA publishers
| (https://www.lockss.org/use-lockss/publishers). A couple
| years ago the PKP launched their preservation service, which
| we're really excited about as it also offers free
| preservation (for OJS journals) and would help esp. those
| smaller journals that otherwise couldn't afford to enroll
| into preservation schemes.
| mturmon wrote:
| 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.
| mordae wrote:
| This.
| jmmcd wrote:
| Counter-point: we all know that "free" internet services are
| flaky. Eg many people prefer to pay for email, for reliability.
| This article introduces the perspective that OA journals are a
| bit like ad-supported email.
|
| I don't really agree that traditional publishers lose all
| articles by default by this metric. I think there is some value
| in a reliable record of the journal itself, as more than the
| sum of its parts.
|
| Still, my preferred solution for all of this is like JMLR --
| very low-cost and open access, and it has reliability by virtue
| of association with a top university, and prestige by virtue of
| its editorial board (which becomes self-fulfilling).
| jp1016 wrote:
| read an article about waybackmachine , archive.org on hn few days
| back, will there be a copy on it ?
| l_matthia wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If its in SciHub, it's in Archive.org, just not accessible.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Say more? All of scihub is mirrored at archive.org? Where do
| I find out more about this?
| thomasballinger wrote:
| A related project is fatcat.wiki
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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?
| rektide wrote:
| Welcome to our new dark-aged ultra-tech future.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
| SamLicious wrote:
| Yeah, same for wikipedia
| aksss wrote:
| This isn't just a problem with scientific journals, but also
| niche research/enthusiast journals. When a magazine goes under,
| and the copyright holder is of a murky/unknown status, still too
| dangerous to digitize and make available, which is a shame.
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