On Sep 14, 2020, at 8:36 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Toby Green <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2020 08:37:38 +0200

Werner,

I am working on a project to recapture lost/make safe threatened materials like this. Could you share more detail about these institutes so I can see if we can help?

I look forward to hearing from you.

(And if anyone else on this list knows of similar cases or would like to learn more about our project, do get in touch.)

Toby

Toby Green

Co-founder

Coherent Digital

+33 6 07 76 80 86

On 13 Sep 2020, at 23:48, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:



From: Werner Hillebrecht <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2020 09:52:29 +0200

The problem of disappearing online scholarly material is of course much wider than journals, but includes research reports that not always made it into journal publications. It seems especially rife with poorer countries whose institutions are dependent on fickle donor funding. I have experienced this locally with an economics research institute (closed down after 25 years and hundreds of research reports, website shut down and computers sold before the national archives could intervene, luckily the paper documentation survived but is awaiting proper accessioning at the understaffed archives) and a world-renowned environmental research institute with a timeline of 60 years (still existing but new management reduced website to a skeleton). And in countries like ours, national institutions have neither the digital storage space nor the web crawler technology to save such material pro-actively. 

Werner Hillebrecht

Namibia History - Heritage - Documentation

PO Box 31687 Pioneerspark, Windhoek, Namibia

mobile 264 (0) 81 6100691

[log in to unmask]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 5:48 AM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Danny Kingsley <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2020 11:06:13 +1000

Hi all,

This is very concerning. I have ‘rescued’ a few journals in my time - small journals often run for years by one person who has or is retiring and the journal has been hosted on a departmental webpage which is being updated. Putting the back catalogue into a repository at least collects the information - it doesn’t necessarily display it the way a journal would but it is better than nothing.

Collectively we need to consider how to address this issue. How aware are people of the publishing that is occurring within their own institutions? Academic-led publishing takes multiple forms, and the people doing the work may not have much awareness of wider issues, like registering with DOAJ or CLOCKSS.

Danny

On 10 Sep 2020, at 10:44, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2020 20:20:49 -0400

"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."

[SNIP]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/dozens-scientific-journals-have-vanished-internet-and-no-one-preserved-them