from the someone-should-create-an-internet-archive dept.
While the immediacy of publishing information on the Internet dramatically speeds the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system has introduced challenges that Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are seeking to address.
"For more than 70 percent of papers that link to web pages, revisiting the originally referenced web content proved impossible," said Herbert Van de Sompel, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. "These results are alarming because vanishing references undermine the long-term integrity of the scholarly record."
http://phys.org/news/2015-01-online-scholarly-articles-affected.html
[Article]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday January 29 2015, @09:16AM
Don't worry, I'm not just a sarcastic bastard - I have the solution!
Start pulling down the current copyright laws - expand Fair Use rights. Make anything which wishes to call itself educational freely archivable and disseminable in an educational context - in full. Uploads to ArXiv may then be accompanied by all the reference material needed (and ArXiv can deduplicate, obviously to stop exponential growth). Augment ArXiv with multiple independent mirrors to remove any single point of funding and single point of failure.
This will fuck Elsevier's business model. Noone with a soul will shed a tear.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:59AM
It's called open access.
There's no need to rework copyright law. Instead, tax-funded publications should be required to be made freely available.
I believe this is the way things are going in the UK, but a quick search didn't turn up a source.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:00PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:38PM
The distinction is fair, but I don't like the idea. You're saying that Fair Use should be extended to essentially remove all copyrights over academic publications, even from non-tax-funded sources?
If research is privately-funded, and published behind a paywall, I don't see that it's reasonable for the government to essentially strike-down the paywall... and thus kill the publisher, too.
Or did you mean something else by you propagating others' work?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:33PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday February 02 2015, @12:43PM
I oppose any change which would forcibly crush the academic publishing industry... despite that I dislike the industry.
Property rights are a cornerstone of Western society. It does not do for the government to step in and decree that We don't like this use of copyright. Game over.
I see no reason not to require tax-funded work to be freely available though. That should be required by law.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Nuke on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:35PM
Merely sorting copyright does not solve the problem as I see it.
I am currently creating a web site, which is not scholarly and is more to do with economics and history. I have numerous references, some of which are to complete books, and some others are to YouTube videos. Even without copyright issues, it is unreasonable to upload that lot to ArXiv, just for my little website. Something like the Wayback machine is more appropriate, but I don't know how that can be practical in the long term. Wikipedia reckons that it is growing at 20 terabytes each week.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:46PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:35PM
Start pulling down the current copyright laws - expand Fair Use rights. Make anything which wishes to call itself educational freely archivable and disseminable in an educational context - in full.
Man, I wish the purpose of copyright was to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. We might have a chance if that were the case.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 29 2015, @09:01PM
Non-alphanumeric parts of this post are Public Domain. The rest may not be reproduced at all, e.g. mixed with other characters. If viewers are quizical, it's not a joke.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:25PM
For some reason I can't cut and paste the quote but the article says that other studies have shown that searching the Internet Archive and Google cache they were able to reduce the number of lost links from 36% down to just 5% when looking at a group of papers from 2006-2008.
The article then goes on to state (if I understant their big words correctly) that this is not a solution because they aren't necessarily seeing the linked page as it was from the same time as the author linked to it. It may be different. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me because internetarchive.org has a great calendar view where you can see all the times that they archived a page and chose the one closest to the date you need. I don't know about these 'scholarly writings' but I use it all the time for 'dead link' maker type project articles and can almost always find at least one date something was archived where it contains the content I am looking for. It isn't always the latest date, sometimes I do have to look for a date close to when the link was made. And.. usually it's there!
What surprises me is that they find the articles archived at all. Isn't most of that stuff behind paywalls?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:19PM
This is precisely the issue DOIs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier [wikipedia.org] were created to address.
How many DOIs for your articles can you find here: http://www.crossref.org/ [crossref.org]?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:03PM
How long does the Internet Archive save versions of webpages? Do they keep the old versions forever? Assuming they keep old versions "forever" a simple solution might be linking to the Internet Archive instead of the actual page itself.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"