The endangered research papers

 A staggering revelation hits the academic world hard—over a quarter of scholarly articles are disappearing into the digital void, unarchived and lost to future research! In a deep dive into the abyss of more than seven million digital documents, researchers have unveiled a chilling truth on 24 January in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. The digital safeguarding systems we trusted are falling behind, unable to keep up with the explosive expansion of research outputs.

Imagine the foundation of science and research—a towering edifice built on the bedrock of references and citations—now teetering on the brink as Martin Eve, a literary, tech, and publishing maestro from Birkbeck, University of London, paints a dire picture. "The essence of our scientific knowledge hangs by a thread of citations," he declares, voicing a stark warning: lose the thread, and we plunge into the dark abyss of unverified claims and blind faith.

Eve, alongside his role at Crossref, a titan in digital infrastructure, embarked on a quest, probing the fate of 7,438,037 works stamped with digital object identifiers (DOIs). These DOIs, unique digital fingerprints, should have been the lifeline keeping these works accessible for eternity. Yet, shockingly, a whopping 28%—more than two million treasures—were nowhere to be found in any major digital archive, despite their DOIs screaming "I exist!"

The preservation battlefield is marred with challenges, Eve notes, admitting the study's gaze was fixed solely on DOI-tagged articles, leaving out a vast uncharted territory of digital repositories unexplored. The preservation community, however, hails this study as a beacon, shining light on the vast digital preservation conundrum facing e-journals. William Kilbride of the Digital Preservation Coalition and Mikael Laakso from Hanken School of Economics echo the sentiment, debunking the myth that a DOI equals eternal life online.

Kate Wittenberg from Portico raises an alarm for the underdogs—the small publishers whose scant resources put them at the greatest risk of digital disappearance. "Archiving isn't free," she reminds us, underlining the colossal infrastructure, tech savvy, and expertise required—a tall order for the smaller entities.

In a rallying cry for action, Eve proposes bolstering DOI registration protocols and ramping up education on digital preservation among publishers and researchers alike. The vision? A future where, even a century post-mortem, scholars can access and build upon your life's work. The question remains—will we rise to preserve the digital legacy of research, or will we watch as more scholarly treasures slip through the cracks of the digital age?

Source: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00616-5