SoylentNews

Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/study-finds-that-we-could-lose-science-if-publishers-go-bankrupt/ [arstechnica.com]

Back when scientific publications came in paper form, libraries played a key role in ensuring that knowledge didn't disappear. Copies went out to so many libraries that any failure—a publisher going bankrupt, a library getting closed—wouldn't put us at risk of losing information. But, as with anything else, scientific content has gone digital, which has changed what's involved with preservation.
[...]
The work was done by Martin Eve [crossref.org], a developer at Crossref. That's the organization that organizes the DOI system, which provides a permanent pointer toward digital documents, including almost every scientific publication. If updates are done properly, a DOI will always resolve to a document, even if that document gets shifted to a new URL.

But it also has a way of handling documents disappearing from their expected location, as might happen if a publisher went bankrupt. There is a set of what's called "dark archives" that the public doesn't have access to but should contain copies of anything that has had a DOI assigned. If anything goes wrong with a DOI, it should trigger the dark archives to open access and the DOI to update to point to the copy in the dark archive.

For that to work, however, copies of everything published must be in the archives. So Eve decided to check whether that's the case.
[...]
When Eve broke down the results by publisher, less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers had put the majority of their content into multiple archives. (The cutoff was 75 percent of their content in three or more archives.) Fewer than 10 percent had put more than half their content in at least two archives. And a full third seemed to be doing no organized archiving at all.
[...]
The good news is that large academic publishers appear to be reasonably good about getting things into archives; most of the unarchived issues stem from smaller publishers.
[...]
None of this is to say that we've already lost important research documents. But Eve's paper serves a valuable function by highlighting that the risk is real. We're well into the era where print copies of journals are irrelevant to most academics, and digital-only academic journals have proliferated. It's long past time for us to have clear standards in place to ensure that digital versions of research have the endurance that print works have enjoyed.

Original Submission