The United States too: Mandatory Deposit | U.S. Copyright Office
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Seems like we’ve fixed the problem of academic papers, we need an international central repository whose focus is longevity and comprehensive collection. Who can get that started 
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That’s like saying we need a skilled army of doctors who can cure any known disease and bring longevity to every corner of the world. It is as great a vision as it is unrealistic. Strong centrifugal forces in the politically-affiliated global scientific community precludes the birth of a unified and open information repository system, despite the proclaimed universality of the quest of science. And I’d very much like to see myself proven wrong.
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I was joking, hence the comment at the end about who can get it started and the laughing emoji. Of course no-one can deliver that! The UN can’t even get countries to agree that destroying the planet is probably bad - it (and other multinational orgs) are never going to be able to deliver a unified central library.
Fun to think about though.
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After reading the actual study the article summarizes, I suspect this is much ado about nothing.
At most, it seems to me the study demonstrates that lots of Digital Object Identifiers (doi:) are assigned but never used. I have no doubt that is true - just like there are lots of domains that are assigned but never used, lots of articles of incorporation filed where the business never files a tax return, marriage certificates obtained where a marriage never occurs, etc etc.
The article does not give specific examples where a doi: is referenced in Google Scholar or Pubmed or some other academic database and then the article cannot be found. Indeed - I do a whole lot of academic literature searches and I am not sure if I have ever encountered such an experience.
Can anyone here give an actual example in any discipline where you have done a literature search, found a an abstract or other metadata describing an article of interest to you, then you could not resolve the doi: to the actual article?
jlsc-16288-eve.pdf (921.3 KB)
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I was just looking for an article that is just 25 years old. I have a bad scan I got from the author in 2008–
No local library has the hard copy–and the database subscriptions I have access to only give me 10 years of access to that specific journal (and quite frankly, I’m not hopeful that the scan would be any better).
The last time I ordered it from my library using Interlibrary Loan, they gave me the same bad scan I already have…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s a great challenge–I’ve been thinking a lot about this since OP–and I can think of articles or chapters that are hard to find.
But the only reference I’ve ever searched for and couldn’t find (as opposed to finding it behind a paywall or just hard to get) was an unpublished paper–so that doesn’t really count. I can’t think of any reference with a DOI that haven’t been able to track down (one had an easy-to-fix typo).
Field: Psychology
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I haven’t as a matter of fact, not that I can remember, I have had a few articles without a DOI which I couldn’t find. Could be other reasons of course that it was lost. I was pondering after mentioning micro-fiche how much better retrieval and curating stuff is now with tools like DEVONthink 3. It is really is way way better. Printed books still have an ease of use and utility though.
Yes and to add to @rkaplan 's point I wonder how much of any importance is actually lost, some estimates say scientific papers alone are doubling every 9 years and have been for a long time. Hard to say too what are ‘quality’ papers, predatory publishing is a problem and for many of those it would be preferable that they were lost.
PubMed alone adds a million papers a year. Why PubMed is always the bench mark though… ’
I spoke once to someone at the British Library who said one of the problems he had aniticipated was not storing but having things to actually read some formats. I suppose those horrid micro-fiche newspaper files were an example?
I don’t know how that worked for peer review papers though.
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I keep thinking someday Archive.org will start taking DT archives, if they don’t already. This is where I’m hoping my own archives could live after I die.
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I haven’t, but my main [sub]field has only existed since the 1990s and most papers have only been published in the last 15 years, so my field probably isn’t a good example.
There’s obviously the “we must preserve knowledge” angle to this story, but I do think as well there’s a “we should make it easy for readers” angle. It’s very irritating when you click on a link in a reference and it takes you to a dead page. Then you have to go back to the paper to copy and paste the reference. I feel we can probably do better with this.
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