Study Finds That We Could Lose Science If Publishers Go Bankrupt
Freeman writes:
Back when scientific publications came in paper form, libraries played a key role in ensuring that knowledge didn't disappear. Copies went out to so many libraries that any failure-a publisher going bankrupt, a library getting closed-wouldn't put us at risk of losing information. But, as with anything else, scientific content has gone digital, which has changed what's involved with preservation.
[...] The work was done by Martin Eve, a developer at Crossref. That's the organization that organizes the DOI system, which provides a permanent pointer toward digital documents, including almost every scientific publication. If updates are done properly, a DOI will always resolve to a document, even if that document gets shifted to a new URL.
But it also has a way of handling documents disappearing from their expected location, as might happen if a publisher went bankrupt. There is a set of what's called "dark archives" that the public doesn't have access to but should contain copies of anything that has had a DOI assigned. If anything goes wrong with a DOI, it should trigger the dark archives to open access and the DOI to update to point to the copy in the dark archive.
For that to work, however, copies of everything published must be in the archives. So Eve decided to check whether that's the case.
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