How the Internet Archive is Ensuring Permanent Access to Open Access Journal Articles

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Internet Archive has archived and identified 9 million open access journal articles– the next 5 million is getting harder

Open Access journals, such as New Theology Review (ISSN: 0896-4297) and Open Journal of Hematology (ISSN: 2075-907X), made their research articles available for free online for years. With a quick click or a simple query, students anywhere in the world could access their articles, and diligent Wikipedia editors could verify facts against original articles on vitamin deficiency and blood donation.

But some journals, such as these titles, are no longer available from the publisher’s websites, and are only available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Since 2017, the Internet Archive joined others in concentrating on archiving all scholarly literature and making it permanently accessible.

The World Wide Web has made it easier than ever for scholars to recent mobile phone number data collaborate, debate, and share their research. Unfortunately, the structure of today’s web means that content can disappear just as easily: as of today the official publisher websites and DOI redirects for both of the above journals go nowhere or have been replaced with unrelated content.




Wayback Machine captures of Open Access journals now “vanished” from publisher websites
Vigilant librarians saw this problem coming decades ago, when the print-to-digital migration was getting started. They insisted that commercial publishers work with contract digital preservation organizations (such as Portico, LOCKSS, and CLOCKSS) to ensure long-term access to expensive journal subscription content. Efforts have been made to preserve open articles as well, such as Public Knowledge Project’s Private LOCKSS Network for OJS journals and national hosting platforms like the SciELO network. But a portion of all scholarly articles continues to fall through the cracks.

Researchers found that 176 open access journals have already vanished from their publishers’ website over the past two decades, according to a recent preprint article by Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn. These periodicals were from all regions of the world and represented all major disciplines — sciences, humanities and social sciences. There are over 14,000 open access journals indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals and the paper suggests another 900 of those are inactive and at risk of disappearing. The pre-print has struck a nerve, receiving news coverage in Nature and Science.

In 2017, with funding support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Kahle/Austin Foundation, the Internet Archive launched a project focused on preserving all publicly accessible research documents, with a particular focus on open access materials. Our first job was to quantify the scale of the problem.