Most institutions are now investing in online journals or platforms for accessibility. Sure, it’s easier to find research papers and academic journals that can aid us in our studies, but what happens when institutions stop paying for web hosting or the platform’s service? There’s a high risk that the research stored within those services or platforms will disappear. Archivists at the Internet Archive are hard at work preserving open-access journals permanently, as Vice details:
Between 2000 and 2019, nearly 200 open-access journals and the research papers they published have vanished from the internet, according to a new study published on arxiv preprint server. Nine-hundred more inactive, open-access journals are also at high risk of vanishing in the near future, the researchers found.
Of the 176 journals they identified, around one-third vanished from the web within one year of the last publication, taking their articles and research down with them.
Since 2017, archivists at the Internet Archive have worked to preserve open-access journals permanently. "Of the 14.8 million known open access articles published since 1996, the Internet Archive has archived, identified, and made available through the Wayback Machine 9.1 million of them," Brian Newbold at the Internet Archive wrote on Tuesday.
To expand those efforts, IA launched the Fatcat editable catalog with an open API for anyone to contribute open-access scholarly works, as well as a new platform for searching through those archives
Image via Vice