Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 2 decades as publishers stopped maintaining them, potentially depriving scholars of useful research findings, a study has found.
An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at risk of vanishing because they are inactive, says a preprint posted on 3 September on the arXiv server. The number of OA journals tripled from 2009 to 2019, and on average the vanished titles operated for nearly 10 years before going dark, which “might imply that a large number … is yet to vanish,” the authors write.
This is a major risk of the Internet - our current generation could be responsible for a lot of digital loss until some better solution is found. We have the Way Back Machine Archive but it really only makes snapshots of some pages and is not a 100% reliable location for all publications.
See Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet, and no one preserved them
#technology #archives #preservation #records
Specialists worry about a potential loss to scholarship
source https://gadgeteer.co.za/dozens-scientific-journals-have-vanished-internet-and-no-one-preserved-them
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