Digital Preservation: “Act Now to Stop Millions of Research Papers From Disappearing”

From a Nature Editorial:

Millions of research articles are absent from major digital archives. This worrying finding, which Nature reported on earlier this year, was laid bare in a study 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 to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were ‘missing’ from archives — that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future (M. P. Eve J. Libr. Sch. Commun. 12, eP16288; 2024).

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For this Editorial, Nature asked librarians, archivists, scholars and international organizations for suggestions on how to improve the situation. Researchers, institutions and funders should take note of what they can do to help.

At the heart of the problem is a lack of money, 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 the executive director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, a global network of scholarly archives. “It is not just about creating backup copies of things. It is about the active management of content over time in a rapidly evolving technological environment.”

Learn More, Read the Complete Editorial (about 980 words)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Associations and Organizations, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Journal Articles, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, Preservation, Publishing, Reports