Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet

Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by Kednicma on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @01:04PM (#24423107)

This sounds like apologia from a big closed publisher (AAAS) explaining why open-access is supposedly bad. See, sometimes open-access journals fold, and when that happens, nobody knows what happens to the articles. But they'd like you to ignore two inconvenient facts: First, that traditional closed publishers effectively lose all articles by default by this metric! And second, that the Internet Archive, itself open-access, was essential to conducting the study in the first place!

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Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by mturmon on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @03:38PM (#24424993)

AAAS is a non-profit, and Science subscriptions are really cheap — like US$100 for a year of a weekly magazine. They are not money-grubbers, and they are very distinct from Springer, Elsevier, and Nature in this regard.

I think they legit view preservation of the scientific record as within their provenance to cover.

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Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by isido on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @02:37PM (#24424212)

I have been involved in the same projects furthering open access within Finnish universities as the corresponding author has, and I think the aim of the study is not make OA look bad, but to make it better by finding its shortcomings and then fixing them.

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Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by l_matthia on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @03:03PM (#24424560)

Exactly. We don't see OA as the problem. OA solves many issues that exist with traditional publishing and also makes it easier to preserve content in the first place. The problem lies with decreasing library budgets, rising subscription prices, and that preservation services often are not suitable for smaller OA journals.

LOCKSS provides a free option for publishers to join, but only accepts a limited number of OA publishers (https://www.lockss.org/use-lockss/publishers). A couple years ago the PKP launched their preservation service, which we're really excited about as it also offers free preservation (for OJS journals) and would help esp. those smaller journals that otherwise couldn't afford to enroll into preservation schemes.

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Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by Nemo_bis on Friday September 11, 2020 @03:20AM (#24439982)

I think the criticism is not about the paper, only about the article describing it.

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Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by jmmcd on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @02:50PM (#24424360)

Counter-point: we all know that "free" internet services are flaky. Eg many people prefer to pay for email, for reliability. This article introduces the perspective that OA journals are a bit like ad-supported email.

I don't really agree that traditional publishers lose all articles by default by this metric. I think there is some value in a reliable record of the journal itself, as more than the sum of its parts.

Still, my preferred solution for all of this is like JMLR -- very low-cost and open access, and it has reliability by virtue of association with a top university, and prestige by virtue of its editorial board (which becomes self-fulfilling).

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Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by Nemo_bis on Friday September 11, 2020 @03:21AM (#24439988)

Commercial publishing giants with subscription journals are ad-supported too, nowadays. You find ads in the weirdest places. https://mamot.fr/@nemobis/104755721369049700

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Re:Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the inte... by mordae on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @02:24PM (#24424081)

This.

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