4 ms·

A key chemistry journal disappeared from the web. Others are at risk

15 points by crescit_eundo 3y ago

crescit_eundo 3y ago
[flagged]
- crescit_eundo 3y ago
  [continued from above …] Alicia Wise, executive director of CLOCKSS in Surrey, UK, confirmed that her organisation does hold a complete record of Heterocycles. According to Wise, the Japan Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry is weighing up future options for the journal. ‘The content is safe and secure and we will be in a position to make it available should they not find a successor organisation to look after it,’ she notes. ‘It’s a useful service,’ says Goodman, referring to CLOCKSS. ‘It’s not clear when the articles will become available again and, of course, until you can see them, you can’t be sure that they’re all there.’ ‘A lot of researchers and libraries think that the long-term preservation of books and journals is a done deal,’ says Wise. ‘But nothing could be farther from the truth.’
saulrh 3y ago
> that duty has transitioned to publishers as > journals have switched to a digital format. I think it's important to note that this can be wholly blamed on the publishers, who froth at the mouth at the thought of any other entity holding even an ephemeral copy of what they consider to be "their" "property". They go out of their way, far out of their way, to prohibit and actively impede availability and durability - after all, a copy that could be distributed after they are gone is also one that could be distributed before they're gone, and they can't have that. And they don't settle for laws, they reach for the technical solutions straightaway, the digital equivalents of printing self-burning books. As far as publishers are concerned, archival isn't just indistinguishable from piracy, it is piracy.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > I think it's important to note that this can be wholly blamed on the publishers Amen to that. > publication in the journal had been suspended and there was no access to the title’s previously published content. As a scientist, for me this is the line. This is the unacceptable face of capitalism and the abject failure of "intellectual property". I don't care that some people round here squirm when the C word is criticised. We are better than this, as a species. Science is simply more important than the rights of the few to make a profit. Aaron Swartz was a visionary and a hero. Alexandra Elbakyan is a viciously maligned worthy successor. We should do what we can technically, and financially to support the creation and maintenance of immutable, permanent, distributed public libraries of all scientific works.
  - gameman144 3y ago
    > I don't care that some people round here squirm when the C word is criticised I am probably one of the staunchest defenders of capitalism, but I totally agree with your stance here. Capitalism is a really really good mechanism for optimizing for outcomes through competition. A huge majority of problems can be solved well by competition, but for those problems that can't be, rules and governance are absolutely critical. For instance, contracting out maintenance of the Washington monument to the best-suited firm makes total sense as a competitive market. Deciding whether we want the Washington monument to exist or not is not something that capitalism or a competitive market is best suited to answer. The wacky thing is that we don't even need to totally discard intellectual property publication rights here -- the New York Times had plenty of exclusive interviews they publish which I can access for free the next day at the library. The government has the unique right to say "Yep, you retain the rights to this publication, but we're giving access to it for free", and to do that by dictum if necessary.
  - floor2 3y ago
    Maybe you'd have more luck if you tried to address the specific problems with copyright law, rather than attack the massively larger, mostly unrelated and somewhat abstract and nebulous concept of "capitalism". You could just as well argue that since these laws were created under democracy, that this is the unacceptable face of democracy. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. We can get a broad coalition of people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs to agree that the current copyright laws need to be changed, but tying that to extremist political stances works against that progress.
tokai 3y ago
>Previously, it was librarians whose duty was to preserve hard copies of manuscripts and make them available We still do that many at many universities even now. Open Access helps a lot, as it makes it possible to save and distribute research without any hassle. Luckily only a few percentages of research literature is actually worth saving, and the loss is not as big as it seems. As with this journal it is out there in substantial quantity. It's articles will not be lost any time soon. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%E2%80%8E0385-5414&itemType=jrnl&itemSubType=jrnl-digital%2Cjrnl-print https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%E2%80%8E0385-5414&item...
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > only a few percentages of research literature is actually worth saving True, but we never know which papers and ideas are in that percentage without some hindsight. > loss is not as big as it seems. It's an opportunity loss. Even poor papers are useful in meta studies and archival research, because they show the errors, and state of the art in a particular milieu. > it is out there in substantial quantity. It's articles will not be lost any time soon. Problem is, there is no coordination. And while old scientists curate wonderful personal collections, old scientists die, and so do their hard drives. We are at constant war with the forces of entropy. One of the biggest chaotic forces is the publishers who fight legal battles against science by laterally spending millions in "spite money" to take down collections.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 3y ago
The purpose of scientific publishing is to generate journal articles, and occasionally to cite them to operate an "impact" metric. It's not to actually read them.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Write often read never...
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  You're more than half right. In the next stages machines are going to read them for us. That's one of the truly exciting prospects of LLMs. (And why we must ensure that the data and models stay public). Here's how I think the story will go [0]. [0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...

15 points by crescit_eundo 3y ago

crescit_eundo 3y ago

[flagged]

crescit_eundo 3y ago
[continued from above …] Alicia Wise, executive director of CLOCKSS in Surrey, UK, confirmed that her organisation does hold a complete record of Heterocycles. According to Wise, the Japan Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry is weighing up future options for the journal. ‘The content is safe and secure and we will be in a position to make it available should they not find a successor organisation to look after it,’ she notes. ‘It’s a useful service,’ says Goodman, referring to CLOCKSS. ‘It’s not clear when the articles will become available again and, of course, until you can see them, you can’t be sure that they’re all there.’ ‘A lot of researchers and libraries think that the long-term preservation of books and journals is a done deal,’ says Wise. ‘But nothing could be farther from the truth.’

saulrh 3y ago

> that duty has transitioned to publishers as > journals have switched to a digital format. I think it's important to note that this can be wholly blamed on the publishers, who froth at the mouth at the thought of any other entity holding even an ephemeral copy of what they consider to be "their" "property". They go out of their way, far out of their way, to prohibit and actively impede availability and durability - after all, a copy that could be distributed after they are gone is also one that could be distributed before they're gone, and they can't have that. And they don't settle for laws, they reach for the technical solutions straightaway, the digital equivalents of printing self-burning books. As far as publishers are concerned, archival isn't just indistinguishable from piracy, it is piracy.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
> I think it's important to note that this can be wholly blamed on the publishers Amen to that. > publication in the journal had been suspended and there was no access to the title’s previously published content. As a scientist, for me this is the line. This is the unacceptable face of capitalism and the abject failure of "intellectual property". I don't care that some people round here squirm when the C word is criticised. We are better than this, as a species. Science is simply more important than the rights of the few to make a profit. Aaron Swartz was a visionary and a hero. Alexandra Elbakyan is a viciously maligned worthy successor. We should do what we can technically, and financially to support the creation and maintenance of immutable, permanent, distributed public libraries of all scientific works.
- gameman144 3y ago
  > I don't care that some people round here squirm when the C word is criticised I am probably one of the staunchest defenders of capitalism, but I totally agree with your stance here. Capitalism is a really really good mechanism for optimizing for outcomes through competition. A huge majority of problems can be solved well by competition, but for those problems that can't be, rules and governance are absolutely critical. For instance, contracting out maintenance of the Washington monument to the best-suited firm makes total sense as a competitive market. Deciding whether we want the Washington monument to exist or not is not something that capitalism or a competitive market is best suited to answer. The wacky thing is that we don't even need to totally discard intellectual property publication rights here -- the New York Times had plenty of exclusive interviews they publish which I can access for free the next day at the library. The government has the unique right to say "Yep, you retain the rights to this publication, but we're giving access to it for free", and to do that by dictum if necessary.
- floor2 3y ago
  Maybe you'd have more luck if you tried to address the specific problems with copyright law, rather than attack the massively larger, mostly unrelated and somewhat abstract and nebulous concept of "capitalism". You could just as well argue that since these laws were created under democracy, that this is the unacceptable face of democracy. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. We can get a broad coalition of people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs to agree that the current copyright laws need to be changed, but tying that to extremist political stances works against that progress.

tokai 3y ago

>Previously, it was librarians whose duty was to preserve hard copies of manuscripts and make them available We still do that many at many universities even now. Open Access helps a lot, as it makes it possible to save and distribute research without any hassle. Luckily only a few percentages of research literature is actually worth saving, and the loss is not as big as it seems. As with this journal it is out there in substantial quantity. It's articles will not be lost any time soon. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%E2%80%8E0385-5414&itemType=jrnl&itemSubType=jrnl-digital%2Cjrnl-print https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%E2%80%8E0385-5414&item...

nonrandomstring 3y ago
> only a few percentages of research literature is actually worth saving True, but we never know which papers and ideas are in that percentage without some hindsight. > loss is not as big as it seems. It's an opportunity loss. Even poor papers are useful in meta studies and archival research, because they show the errors, and state of the art in a particular milieu. > it is out there in substantial quantity. It's articles will not be lost any time soon. Problem is, there is no coordination. And while old scientists curate wonderful personal collections, old scientists die, and so do their hard drives. We are at constant war with the forces of entropy. One of the biggest chaotic forces is the publishers who fight legal battles against science by laterally spending millions in "spite money" to take down collections.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 3y ago

The purpose of scientific publishing is to generate journal articles, and occasionally to cite them to operate an "impact" metric. It's not to actually read them.

readthenotes1 3y ago
Write often read never...
nonrandomstring 3y ago
You're more than half right. In the next stages machines are going to read them for us. That's one of the truly exciting prospects of LLMs. (And why we must ensure that the data and models stay public). Here's how I think the story will go [0]. [0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...