<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/09/how-copyright-may-destroy-our-access-to-the-worlds-academic-knowledge/>
"The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of
life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is in the
world of academic publishing. Academic papers are costly to publish and
distribute on paper, but in a digital format they can be shared globally for
almost no cost. That’s one of the driving forces behind the open access
movement. But as
Walled Culture has reported, resistance from the traditional
publishing world has slowed the shift to open access, and undercut the benefits
that could flow from it.
That in itself is bad news, but new research from Martin Paul Eve (available as
open access) shows that the way the shift to digital has been managed by
publishers brings with it a new problem. For all their flaws, analogue
publications have the great virtue that they are durable: once a library has a
copy, it is likely to be available for decades, if not centuries. Digital
scholarly articles come with no such guarantee. The Internet is constantly in
flux, with many publishers and sites closing down each year, often without
notice. That’s a problem when sites holding archival copies of scholarly
articles vanish, making it harder, perhaps impossible, to access important
papers. Eve explored whether publishers were placing copies of the articles
they published in key archives. Ideally, digital papers would be available in
multiple archives to ensure resilience, but the reality is that very few
publishers did this.
Ars Technica has a good summary of Eve’s results:
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.
At the individual publication level, under 60 percent were present in at
least one archive, and over a quarter didn’t appear to be in any of the
archives at all. (Another 14 percent were published too recently to have
been archived or had incomplete records.)
This very patchy coverage is concerning, for reasons outlined by
Ars
Technica:
The risk here is that, ultimately, we may lose access to some academic
research. As Eve phrases it, knowledge gets expanded because we’re able to
build upon a foundation of facts that we can trace back through a chain of
references. If we start losing those links, then the foundation gets
shakier. Archiving comes with its own set of challenges: It costs money, it
has to be organized, consistent means of accessing the archived material
need to be established, and so on."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
