Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps
- Reference: 1599721446
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/10/open_access_journal/
- Source link:
The findings are documented in [1]a research paper distributed via ArXiv, "Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals."
Authors Mikael Laakso of Hanken School of Economics of Helsinki, Lisa Matthias of the Free University of Berlin, and Najko Jahn of the University of Göttingen surveyed various bibliographic indexes and the Director of Open Access Journals, and tried to trace the publications through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Open access journals, as the term suggests, are made accessible to internet users at no charge, in contrast to traditional subscription-based journals. There's an ongoing debate among researchers about whether to publish in an OA journal or a subscription-based title. The decision affects article distribution, publication speed, publication cost, professional prestige, and other factors.
The issue surfaced last year when the University of California [2]terminated its subscription with scientific publishing giant Elsevier over the price it demanded for access to its collection of more than 2,000 journals. The UC system wants Elsevier to provide open access publishing for UC-authored articles and to provide UC scholars with access to journal content at a reasonable price. Negations remain ongoing.
The restrictions and costs imposed by traditional academic publishers like Elsevier led Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan in 2011 to found Sci-Hub, a website that shares research papers at no cost and with no regard for US copyright law.
OA journals by design are more affordable and accessible than their subscription-based kin, but their lack of a funding model makes their ongoing survival more precarious.
The slow creep of information loss
Laakso, Matthias, and Jahn note that while OA journals "are not vanishing in vast numbers," their disappearance affects certain disciplines disproportionately. Journals associated with academic institutions or scholarly groups in North America, and with social sciences and humanities research, represented a larger portion of the disappeared content than others.
"Our findings suggest that current approaches to digital preservation are successful in archiving content from larger journals and established publishing houses but leave behind those that are more at risk," the authors state in the paper. "Hence, preservation initiatives may need to re-evaluate their current strategy and develop alternative pathways—ideally in close collaboration and consultation with university and society journals—that are better suited for smaller journals that operate without the support of large, professional publishers."
Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles [3]READ MORE
In an email to The Register , Brewster Kahle, director and co-founder of the Internet Archive, "We have found much the same thing with open access journals – they are often untended," adding he's glad the issue is being formally studied.
Kahle said the Internet Archive has been crawling the web for 25 years but started focusing on academic periodicals in 2018. The Mellon Foundation, he said, gave the Internet Archive a grant along these lines in 2019.
"So we are now crawling long tail journal literature and also datasets as they are available on the web," he said, "We are geared up significantly because of these grants, and frankly the discoveries we have made about how much support the Commons needs."
Bryan Newbold of the Internet Archive said that by the Internet Archive's analysis, "18 per cent of all open access articles since 1945, over three million, are not independently archived by us or another preservation organization, other than the publishers themselves."
Newbold said the Internet Archive has been in contact with the paper's authors and are working to improve article crawling. "There is a 'save paper now' feature, as well as an API for bots, Organizations like DOAJ, ISSN, DOI registrars (Crossref, Datacite, others) are crucial for this," he said. "
The Internet Archive aims to augment its efforts by partnering with larger publishers, such as LOCKSS, Portico, JSTOR, and institutional repositories.
Newbold said it would be helpful to have the equivalent of youtube-dl – a tool for downloading YouTube videos – for open access papers.
"There is a lot of content on large platforms and publishers which have anti-crawling measures (even for gold OA and hybrid content!), as well as a long tail of small publishers that don't use simple/common mechanisms like OAI-PMH and the 'citation_pdf_url' HTML meta tag to identify full text content. The OAI-PMH ecosystem sadly is not very complete or helpful for the use case of mirroring," said Newbold. ®
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[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11933
[2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-terminates-subscriptions-worlds-largest-scientific-publisher-push-open-access-publicly
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
OA publishing
When some of the academic publishers have profit margins to rival Apple, it's no wonder they are trying to cling to the traditional publishing model.
'Gold' open access isn't always (and in the larger publishers OA journals, almost never) 'free', it's just free to the end user to read. It still costs the author, or more often their institution or research funder, a potentially large amount (average around $2500 - $3000, per article), with some of the journals with high perceived prestige charging over $5000.
To fix it would require some rebalancing in the academic institutions to allow the researchers to realise that the 'quality' and 'prestige' of the journal derives from the work they publish there and not from the journal itself, and for the institutions and research funders to realise the same thing, so not judge the researchers (in terms of their career development) on where they publish their research, but on the research itself.
Re: OA publishing
Their profit margins are way higher than Apple. Apple pays about 70% of sales receipts to the authors of the content. The academic journals pay out 0%.
Re: OA publishing
I think you'll find that some grant awarding institutions now make publishing papers in open access journals one of the conditions of the grant.
Re: OA publishing
[...] so not judge the researchers (in terms of their career development) on where they publish their research, but on the research itself.
But the current system is built on that. For reputable institutions, academics are evaluated on the performance metrics of the journals they publish in, the journals tend to only select sufficient-quality papers, and in turn those papers (ideally) reinforce the journals' performance rankings.
So for anyone suggesting the current (definitely imperfect) system to be scrapped, the odium is on them to provide a superior alternative.
Re: OA publishing
"the journals tend to only select sufficient-quality papers"
That's the point where it falls down most often, there's no guarantee a "top" journal will accept good work (and they do accept work that's not so good) the prestige is often self sustaining, both on the submissions and readership sides, but decisions to send for review are not transparent and good work can, and does, get sent back almost unread. Then it gets submitted elsewhere, but over a wider spread of journals. Conversely, the biggest name journals have themselves been hit by fraudulent research before and it will continue to happen.
This shouldn't be a problem these days; it's possible to track article impact independently, it's possible to search for and find new articles without looking through a journal's contents page, journal impact isn't necessary anymore but still used . There are better (still flawed) metrics, yet you will still see "publication in high impact journals" as a career development criteria. The goal of publication should be effective communication of your research, not which banner is on the front page.
Re: OA publishing
"the odium is on them to provide a superior alternative."
The odium is definitely on the profiteers.
"Newbold said it would be helpful to have the equivalent of youtube-dl [...] for open access papers"
We do, it's the Unpaywall extension for Chrome and Firefox.
Unpaywall
That's great, if your model of archiving a journal is 'sit in front of a computer for a very long time laboriously downloading papers' If your model is 'write a program which will walk over the journal's site and download the content' it is useless.
Publishers make money from grants
Research is normally funded by grants or simply a result of educational investigations - so essentially the general taxpaying public is funding it. But the research is then published in journals, normally access restricted if you are not paying for a subscription - essentially stopping the general public from being able to read and get educated from the research that they have funded. This is capitalism in action, just an effort to make money - the science is irrelevant.
Should be: "Junk journals disappearing"
These are often open access (but have no useful peer review). They also skip that archiving part(s), mechanisms to guarantee the publications are available after close down (which happens occasionally). One can usually observe the poor quality by just superficial inspection; an extreme example (warning: brain cells will die when you look at this) is http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=35542 (intentionally no link).
Some of those junk journals are actually duplicated versions of an established publication: the web site is scraped (sometimes with all existing papers) and re-published under a domain name similar to the original one. For those one has to check a few articles to notices the poor quality.
Tragedy of the commons
Once a business case has been formulated, we begin an ever accelerating creep into a corporate wasteland.