More than 2M research papers have disappeared from the Internet

I don't know, this article is explicitly about the problem of trying to link to something you find valuable but its supposedly durable url has been taken offline.

The DOI is supposed to ensure a copy can be found, if it fails to do that in 30% of the cases it's not a very useful, regardless of if a copy exists somewhere online.

Indeed, "we can't find many books if we ignore the libraries!"

You don't think this alarm should be raised because there exists illegal copies?

Otherwise what is the limitation? What is the failing that makes it not that useful of a study?

The Library of Congress has the digital infrastructure and expertise to be able to handle something like this issue.

Unfortunately, scientific journals are a sacred cash cow and infringing on any of their territory, real or imagined, prevents any meaningful top down change within the system. They've got money to pay lawyers to prevent any reform or mandates or flexing of existing regulatory powers.

Pirate everything.

Publicly funded research gets lost because it negatively affects profits to maintain unpopular, unread material in any sort of diligent and effective way.

Journals have close ties to universities and academia, and big commercial research outfits, and all of the social ties being involved with those circles can bring. They've got lobbying perfected to an art, and pay good, ruthless lawyers to protect their interests.

The average voter won't ever care enough to make a popular revolt, bottom up change possible; scientific publishing is too dry and anemic when you contrast against the million other, more outrageous, imminently threatening issues people care about. When you look at the conflicted interests that benefit from the status quo, such as companies that can pay Journals so their studies and papers will appear alongside distinguished, credentialed works, there doesn't appear to be any place where effective leverage can be applied.

Pirating it all is the only ethical solution. Outlaws with rogue copies is the only feasible way much of this data will carry on into the future. None of the people who can change things actually seem to want to, and the public has more pressing matters capturing their attention.

Aaron Swartz had it right. Apathy, greed, and politics aren't a problem with a solution that will come from this space. The only winning move is not to play their game.

The same largely applies to any media content being gatekept by entities requiring repeated, endless rent on their "property" despite bringing no value to the market, existing simply to expand, endlessly, mindlessly shoveling other people's money into their shareholder's pockets.

We live in a world that is awfully stupid sometimes. So stupid that important scientific literature is being faded into oblivion simply because it can't be monetized under perverse adtech incentive schemes. This has crucial implications, because if the habit of lazy citation takes root, it creates a kind of secular system of faith in scientism, with authors being given the benefit of the doubt when their citations can't be verified. That could be catastrophic if it affects medicines, engineering, environmental management, urban planning, forensics, or a myriad other categories where a flawed scientific paper might pose a threat.

Knowing that flawed papers get through, what could an actual malicious actor get away with?

Don't let stupid win.

Pirate everything.

Suggestion: Find your own name that isn't coat-tailing on bitwarden.

Or don't, I'm not your mom, but the name tells me not to even investigate, and I care about such things enough to run a YaCy node for example.

I really like the demo videos on your landing page. What did you use to make them?

It’s the worst of both worlds

You have to assume an unappealing photo of yourself you posted in your youth is stored somewhere forever

And, things you actually want to be stored forever and be retrievable when useful, probably won’t.

Sci-hub is dead, hasn't been updates since 2021. Sad state of affairs, hope Anna's Archive can take up the mantle.

Do not forget that you are charged when you publish your work in scientific journals. Would you not expect your published work to be preserved?

> Arxiv feels like the most legitimate "journal" these days.

Fun fact: it was created initially as a central repository mailbox for physics preprints at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Yup, the same Los Alamos that we know from the Manhattan project.

I really don't see DOIs as the problem here. They are just catalogue numbers, not an archive or repository.

The DOIs are still permanent, but their resolvers might not be. Copyright problems definitely makes that harder to fix, but again, I don't think the DOI is the problem here.

This is the equivalent of complaining that file hashes are useless because they don't contain the data originally stored in the file. That is not the purpose.

> If a paper is being forgotten by the internet, that's a weak signal that it was not valued by its field.

That would be valid if the decision was made by popular vote.

It's completely invalid if a single entity is allowed to decide whether it lives or dies.

Some research is forgotten/dismissed by some generation only to be revived by a later generation (see e.g. Geometric Algebra)

Science doesn't work like that; we can't look at data/research at our current point in time and deduce its value forever. Having this information years down the line can inspire some more research ideas or contribute some groundwork to future research

to tell whether a piece of research is false or not, you need to be able to find out what it was. then you can conclusively prove it false. lost research like tesla's weather control notes, the alchemists' transmutation of lead into gold, or water-powered cars can instead give rise to conspiracy theories about how it was suppressed by the powerful and wasted lifetimes that could have been dedicated to something productive

The probability assessment is fine, but meaningless even outside history. Baby and the bathwater