[HN Gopher] Where do Journals go to Die?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Where do Journals go to Die?
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2023-12-11 14:56 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.computationalcomplexity.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.computationalcomplexity.org)
        
       | Method5440 wrote:
       | My best friend and I started a journal together about 10 years
       | ago. It folded when he passed away and now there's almost no
       | proof it even existed. Kinda sad.
       | 
       | https://issuu.com/jes2s
        
         | jiehong wrote:
         | Perhaps it's time to upload it to libgen or something?
        
           | ThinkingGuy wrote:
           | Or the Internet Archive?
        
       | cs702 wrote:
       | The fact that reputable scientific journals can just _disappear_
       | from the historical record is one more reason why public non-
       | profit archives like arXiv are gradually, deservedly, becoming
       | the dominant platforms for sharing and preserving new research.
        
         | greentea23 wrote:
         | I think libgen and scihub are even more future proof. Something
         | as important as scientific (or any) literature must be
         | distributed and uncensorable. Libraries are destroyed by
         | authoritarians all the time throughout history.
        
         | xhkkffbf wrote:
         | Why does making it "public" or "non-profit" make a difference?
         | 
         | Things disappear because no one is paying to keep them up,
         | either directly in time or indirectly with money. The
         | government cuts off projects all of the time causing them to
         | disappear. Witness, for instance, how Henry the VIII cut off
         | Catholic monasteries effectively destroying their archives.
         | Even things sent to well-funded organizations like the US
         | National Archives disappear in confusion.
         | 
         | So while I think you're right that places like arXiv make more
         | sense, I don't think that they're automatically better.
         | 
         | And it's an interesting question whether distributed, open
         | source versions have an advantage. Sure, people can clone
         | repos, but there's often no main person who promises to keep
         | the repo alive making it possible for everyone to just assume
         | someone else will cache a copy.
         | 
         | This is a very complex problem at the deepest level.
        
       | mrkramer wrote:
       | I hope they go to archives.
        
       | bananaflag wrote:
       | I remember my postdoc mentor telling me this anecdote about
       | another student of his PhD advisor:
       | 
       | "He published this result in this journal, which later
       | disappeared. And I mean it literally, it was printed on acid
       | paper which dissolved in the air over time."
       | 
       | Fortunately, that paper was digitized, I could download it.
        
       | idw wrote:
       | The ISSN registry (and usually the relevant national copyright
       | library, I think)
       | 
       | Both examples mentioned turn up on an ISSN search
       | 
       | Antarctica Journal of Mathematics
       | https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0972-8643 published in
       | India from 2004 according to the Indian registry
       | http://nsl.niscair.res.in/ISSNPROCESS/issnassignedinfo.jsp
       | 
       | Journal of combinatorics and number theory
       | https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1942-5600 published in the
       | US Details of holdings at
       | https://search.worldcat.org/title/228503731
        
       | samuell wrote:
       | I read the title first as "Why can't Joomla go to die", and
       | thought it was a very good question :)
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-12-12 23:01 UTC)