Vanishing Papers, Vanishing Journals

 A highlight in Nature this week: Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet 

What happens when a publisher goes bust? Are their journal articles lost forever? 

The digital object identifier (DOI) system used by academic journals, among others, is supposed to be robust to this; the URL to which a DOI points can be updated when the original source is no longer available, provided another source exists. Dark archives such as LOCKSS were developed to preserve scholarly articles and keep them available after the original publisher is no longer around. 

However, according to M. P. Eve writing in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, a substantial fraction (27%) of journal articles linked to a DOI are not preserved in any centralised archive, making them at risk of being lost forever!

This is a particularly important problem for the growing number of for-profit open access journals. They make their money upon publication. Who will pay for the preservation of their articles? Under the subscription model where the journal holds the article copyright, this is an asset that remains valuable even after the journal has ceased publishing new articles. This is not the case for open access journals - they are only as valuable as long as they maintain a steady stream of submissions and published articles.

Preservation of the scientific record is important. The American Physical Society maintains and sells access to their archive of publications dating all the way back to 1893. How many of today's open access journals will remain accessible a hundred years from now?