Act now to stop millions of research papers from disappearing

Millions of research articles are missing from major digital archives. This worrying discovery, which Nature reported on earlier this year, was uncovered in a study conducted by Martin Eve, who studies technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports.

Eve, who is also a research developer at Crossref, an organisation that registers DOIs, conducted the study in an attempt to better understand a problem that librarians and archivists were already aware of – that although researchers are generating knowledge at an unprecedented rate, it is not necessarily being stored safely for the future.

One contributing factor is that not all journals or learned societies survive forever. For example, a 2021 study found that the lack of comprehensive and open archiving meant that 174 open-access journals covering all major research disciplines and geographic regions disappeared from the web in the first two decades of this millennium.

The lack of long-term archiving particularly affects institutions in low- and middle-income countries, less endowed institutions in rich countries, and smaller, less resourced journals around the world. Yet it is unclear whether researchers, institutions, and governments have fully grasped this problem.

“Preservation is an issue and it is an issue that everyone pays attention to, but it is not an easy issue to solve,” says Iryna Kuchma, open-access program manager at Electronic Information for Libraries, a nonprofit organization in Vilnius that aims to improve people’s access to digital information.

\”More and more journals are being set up with fewer and fewer checks and balances,\” says Ginny Hendricks, Crossref\’s chief program officer, who is based in London.

\”You have the big publishers, who are doing a good job, but then there are journals halfway around the world that are running on very little money, and it costs them money to get any kind of service from preservation networks, if they even know about them.\”

For this editorial, Nature sought suggestions from librarians, archivists, scholars and international organizations on how to improve the situation. Researchers, institutions and funders should look at what they can do to help.

The root cause of the problem is a lack of funding, infrastructure and expertise to archive digital resources. \”Digital preservation is expensive and also quite difficult,\” says Kathleen Shearer, who is based in Montreal, Canada, and is executive director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, a global network of scholarly archives.

\”It\’s not just about making backup copies of things. It\’s about actively managing content over time in a rapidly evolving technological environment.\”

For institutions that can afford it, one solution is to pay preservation archives to safeguard content. Examples include Portico, based in New York City, and ClocusS, based in Stanford, California, both of which count growing numbers of publishers and libraries as clients.

But when money is tight, archiving is often not a priority, as is typically the case for publishers with fewer resources.

\”It\’s a big challenge because a lot of these journals are smaller and they\’re more at risk because they don\’t have their own robust infrastructure for platforms and preservation services,\” says Kate Wittenberg, managing director of Portico.

Another option might be for institutions and funding bodies to include text and data archiving as a requirement alongside the publication of papers in research projects.

At a minimum, this would mean depositing work in institutional repositories, in cases where such facilities exist. When they don’t, making archiving mandatory would force researchers and their funding bodies to think hard and find solutions to meet the need for archiving.

Making archiving mandatory would also encourage universities that don’t yet operate their own archives to work toward setting one up.

“Universities are one of the most enduring elements of our society,” says Hussein Suleiman, a digital library scholar at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. “If we adopt it widely, it would be a protection mechanism for the knowledge of our current generation so that future generations can access it.”