Gone. A recent study shows that between 2000-2019, more than 176 open access journals have literally disappeared. Another 900 journals are at high risk of vanishing too. These online-only publications span the sciences, social sciences and the humanities. But is this important scholarship really gone for good?
This month, the Internet Archive announced it has been working with partners since 2017 to ensure permanent access to open access journals. We’ve identified 9.1 million open access articles that we’ve preserved in the Wayback Machine. But our engineers say the next 5 million will be much harder to identify and extract.
Recovering lost research is a team effort. We’ve built an editable catalog with an open API so anyone can contribute. And since the software and data are free and open source, we invite you to use the content for new research and products.
Learn how you can get involved and contribute to bringing back the journal articles many thought were lost.
Great! I find the Wayback Machine really useful for accessing old webpages and also often archive pages that I find useful but think may disappear (mostly blogs, sometimes announcements on organizational pages). I’m glad to see they are serious about backing up Open Access publications (although it would be better if all Open Access journals were serious about backing up their own publications!).
