Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet
Submitted 8 months ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00616-5
Comments
ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world 8 months ago
bobo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
except Sci-hub hasn’t been adding new papers since 2020. Anna’s Archive is a better bet, because they aggregate both sci-hub and libgen, among others. They also make torrents available for data hoarders.
ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You’re right about Sci-Hub because of their Indian lawsuit which is very important to them, but I didn’t know that Anna’s Archive was a repository of scientific journals. Is it? I know Library Genesis (or LibGen) has a lot of scientific textbooks, but I didn’t know it had papers. Does it?
Anyhow, Anna’s Archive and LibGen are super awesome too!
BertramDitore@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Aaron Swartz would like a word.
Brewchin@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’d love to see DOI automating a copy of each entry to archive.org. This would improve the likelihood of them remaining available.
Sure, it would make grifters like Elsevier mad, but scientific knowledge worth a DOI entry shouldn’t be limited to a for-profit organisation.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
you’re thinking of scihub
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
So you can mirror all of it for about $2000?
bobo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
except Sci-hub hasn’t been adding new papers since 2020. Anna’s Archive is a better bet, because they aggregate both sci-hub and libgen, among others. They also make torrents available for data hoarders. Their torrents total over 600 TB at this point, but include books in addition to articles.
GrymEdm@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s interesting reading quotes from that article like: “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.” and “After you’ve been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you’ve worked on?”
It reminds me of problems the US military is having with refitting/upgrading old ICBMs. From the 2021 article, “Minuteman III Missiles Are Too Old to Upgrade Anymore, STRATCOM Chief Says”: "Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”
It’s sounds like the danger is we’ll be able to access the science (or just trust it’s true) but in some cases we’ll be unable to retrace our steps.
tunetardis@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Good Lord, if the US nuclear arsenal is that antiquated, I shudder to think of where the Russians are at. Please don’t short-circuit and accidentally launch…
ripcord@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I wonder if the fact that none have actually exploded yet means that we should be reassured that the vast majority wouldn’t actually work.
Or, possibly, just have had their components and fuel stripped decades ago and they’re just being “maintained” to keep up appearances for higher-ups. That one is definitely true in at least some cases.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There’s a difference between old technology and old things. The missiles themselves are extremely well cared for.
peak_dunning_krueger@feddit.de 8 months ago
…and whose fault is that, private publishing industry? Hmmm? Who didn’t invest here?
Also #politics for allowing it to happen of course.
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
steventrouble@programming.dev 8 months ago
I wonder how many of those are freely accessible in libgen.
boatsnhos931@lemmy.world 8 months ago
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 8 months ago
[deleted]Psythik@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I see what you did there
rimu@piefed.social 8 months ago
This sounds like a situation where a "distributed append-only ledger" might actually be useful for once?
theluddite@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that’s right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges rent the very institutions that produced the knowledge rent to access it. It’s all upside. Because they’re the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.
GrymEdm@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Wow, I never knew about that and it’s not just a small fee either. This 2020 article has it at 9,500 Euro/10,300 USD. “Some observers worry Nature’s €9500 publishing fee is so high that it threatens to divide authors into two tiers—those at wealthy institutions or with access to funds to pay, and everyone else.”
Definitely sounds like you’re right to call them out on the hypocrisy of this article.
theluddite@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Yeah, it’s grotesque. Doubly so when you consider that it’s often public money that funds the research that they get to paywall. I’ve been really ragging on them lately for their role in the AI hype, too, which you can read about here and here if that sort of thing interests you.
braxy29@lemmy.world 8 months ago
youtu.be/ukAkG6c_N4M?si=6LbXPPh1nd1JB1cr
youtu.be/8F9gzQz1Pms?si=FiI1Ox2nVKalwUdg
jabathekek@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Image
neurosnail@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Nb. Nature News Team is editorially independent from the Journal title “Nature”.
theluddite@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I’m suspicious of this concept of editorial independence. I think it’s a smoke screen that lets companies have their cake and eat it too. As far as I’m concerned, whoever cashes the checks also gets the blame, because either ownership means something, in which case the concept exists to obfuscate that, or it doesn’t, in which case why is nature buying up other journals?
b3an@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Well by posting this they give the appearance of being on the good side.