More than 2 million research articles have disappeared from the Internet!

A recent study on digital publications revealed that more than a quarter of scientific articles published on the internet were not adequately protected. So many of the published articles disappear unnoticed. Here are the details about the lost research article data…

Are the archives of the scientific world safe enough? Where are the more than 2 million research papers?

According to data published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on January 24, it was revealed that the systems for storing articles online, that is, in digital environments, did not work well enough. In the first stage of the studies, the number and systematics of the content in the archive were calculated. Then, the direct results of the studies whose data were stored were discussed and it was noticed that the content numbers did not match each other.

Regarding the subject, author Martin Eve, a researcher in the field of literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, checked whether 7 million 438 thousand 37 works tagged with digital object identifiers (DOI) were kept in the archives. Before briefly telling you about the research, we need to talk about DOI technology.

DOI technology assigns a virtual “key” to the data you have prepared in the virtual environment. This key can be a number or a different visual symbol. With these symbols, scientific articles and data are stored in the archives.

In his studies, Eve discovered that approximately one-third of the articles, just over 2 million, were not preserved. Continuing, Mikael Laakso, who studies academic publishing at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, commented that it is a mistake to think that articles stored with DOI data will not be lost forever.

Finally, Kate Wittenberg, general manager of digital archiving service Portico in New York City, warned that small publishers are at higher risk of failing to preserve articles than larger publishers.