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Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot.

posted by martyb on Thursday January 29 2015, @07:32AM   
from the someone-should-create-an-internet-archive dept.

AnonTechie writes:

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

• Re:Now there's a surprise Re:Now there's a surprise (Score: 2, Interesting) by Nuke on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:35PM

  by Nuke (3162) on Thursday January 29 2015, @01:35PM (#139157)

  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.

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• Re:Now there's a surprise (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:46PM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:46PM (#139179) Homepage

  Wikipedia grows so quickly as (a) it maintains a complete change history for every page - even when removing stuff it grows; and (b) it satisfies Sturgeon's law at least as much as any other part of the internet. Also, not everything created needs to be archived, only things that are deemed worthy enough to be reference material, and such material has quite good deduplication potential, again reducing the storage requirements by a significant proportion. Archive.org would indeed be one suitable repository for such an archive; the more, under different control and in different regimes, the better.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

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