How Copyright May Destroy Our Access To The World’s Academic Knowledge
from the we're-destroying-our-knowledge dept
The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is in the world of academic publishing. Academic papers are costly to publish and distribute on paper, but in a digital format they can be shared globally for almost no cost. That’s one of the driving forces behind the open access movement. But as Walled Culture has reported, resistance from the traditional publishing world has slowed the shift to open access, and undercut the benefits that could flow from it.
That in itself is bad news, but new research from Martin Paul Eve (available as open access) shows that the way the shift to digital has been managed by publishers brings with it a new problem. For all their flaws, analogue publications have the great virtue that they are durable: once a library has a copy, it is likely to be available for decades, if not centuries. Digital scholarly articles come with no such guarantee. The Internet is constantly in flux, with many publishers and sites closing down each year, often without notice. That’s a problem when sites holding archival copies of scholarly articles vanish, making it harder, perhaps impossible, to access important papers. Eve explored whether publishers were placing copies of the articles they published in key archives. Ideally, digital papers would be available in multiple archives to ensure resilience, but the reality is that very few publishers did this. Ars Technica has a good summary of Eve’s results:
When Eve broke down the results by publisher, less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers had put the majority of their content into multiple archives. (The cutoff was 75 percent of their content in three or more archives.) Fewer than 10 percent had put more than half their content in at least two archives. And a full third seemed to be doing no organized archiving at all.
At the individual publication level, under 60 percent were present in at least one archive, and over a quarter didn’t appear to be in any of the archives at all. (Another 14 percent were published too recently to have been archived or had incomplete records.)
This very patchy coverage is concerning, for reasons outlined by Ars Technica:
The risk here is that, ultimately, we may lose access to some academic research. As Eve phrases it, knowledge gets expanded because we’re able to build upon a foundation of facts that we can trace back through a chain of references. If we start losing those links, then the foundation gets shakier. Archiving comes with its own set of challenges: It costs money, it has to be organized, consistent means of accessing the archived material need to be established, and so on.
Given the importance of ensuring the long-term availability of academic research the manifest failure of most publishers to guarantee that by putting articles in multiple archives is troubling. What makes things worse is that there is an easy way to improve the resilience of the academic research system. If all papers could be shared freely, there could be many new archives located around the world holding the contents of all academic journals. One or two such archives already exist, for example the well-established Sci-Hub, and the more recent Anna’s Archive, which currently claims to hold around 100,000,000 papers.
Despite the evident value to the academic world and society in general of such multiple, independent backups, traditional publishing houses are pursuing them in the courts, in an attempt to shut them down. It seems that preserving their intellectual monopoly is more important to publishers than preserving the world’s accumulated academic knowledge. It’s a further sign of copyright’s twisted values that those archives offering solutions to the failure of publishers to fulfil their obligations to learning are regarded not as public benefactors, but as public enemies.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: academic knowledge, archives, copyright, libraries
Comments on “How Copyright May Destroy Our Access To The World’s Academic Knowledge”
Conference papers are even worse
I’ve noticed a real issue with academic conference papers. Journals at least pretend to have a plan for the future, but conferences are a lot more uneven. A lot of conference websites aren’t kept up forever.
Some of the papers I worked on don’t exist on conference websites anymore; there’s at least one paper from several years ago that I don’t have a copy of. I really wish EasyChair would partner with arXiv or something.
Given how much research is verified as repeatable (IE “not much”), there can be serious questions about the validity of a lot of papers, especially (but not exclusively) in the soft sciences.
One can only hope that these archives being talked about have robust search mechanisms. Searching through 100 million research papers, to find the one that discussed the precise thing you wanted to know about, is not a thing to be done by hand within a lifetime.
… and that’s just so far. Consider what the situation will be in another 70 years!
Re:
Would that be the 70 years after life?
Corporations have decided that EVERYTHING should be made into a subscription service. Time to start opting out. If we all revert to shopping locally and paying in cash, it will monkey wrench their plan. Also, build your own archives instead of paying for (limited) access to theirs, and stop trading your data for nominal discounts. We can control SOME of what we do, if we plan properly.
There’s a related issue that’s been bugging me for over a decade now, something mostly only concerning to footnote-geeks though–references/citations that rely more and more on URLs that won’t be around all that long. Yeah, who reads books anymore? Who looks at footnotes? which for a long time have morphed into cheaper but really irksome endnotes? Maybe I’m too fucking old but it’s damn near tragic that this is happening.
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This is a big deal. Citations/footnotes/references are the glue that holds this knowledge together. And unfortunately it’s weak glue (in many cases) because of its reliance on transient domains, hosts, systems, and organizations. What we need is a method that’s impervious to those kinds of changes, so that we can decouple the ideas of “referenced paper” and “URL”.
Re: Re:
Easy. Just do what I do and type the title of the paper into a search engine. In many cases, even where the paper was published by a company charging for access, I’ve found the prepublished version on a university website.
If your objective is to ensure access to science then yes, this is a problem, but when an archive or publishing house dies what a capitalist will do is look at this and say that it’s a future opportunity to charge both copyright licensing fees and additional publishing fees. This is something that could be extremely profitable for the ruling class, thus there is no incentive for the government to fix it.
This is a failure of academic libraries and librarians
This could all have been nipped in the bud 2 decades ago, but academic librarians were too excited by the prospect of instant, broad access to demand sensible contracts that provided either a hard copy of all journals, and/or a backup download of all articles.
In fact, if they would work together, they could do this right now. Meanwhile, access from Elsevier and other bullshit middlemen increases WAY faster than inflation, so that an academic library that doesn’t get a 10% increase in their collections budget (and none of them do) are in effect getting a budget cut. This has also been true for decades.
Sadly, librarians are not forward-thinking. I know, because I was one of the few voices pushing for more-than-temporary access to journals 2 decades ago, and the profession as a whole didn’t care.
/former librarian
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This is a failure of US government and its regulatory capture.
Copyright is already destroying our access at all times, just not evenly. If copyright stops you from accessing something, it’s effectively lost media for you, even if it still technically exists for somebody else.
And if I publish a paper under diamond open access, how would the fact that I have a copyright on that paper destroy access to the knowledge in it? Please stop being hyperbolic, it only leads to maximalists screaming for worse laws, as we’ve seen with the MAFIAA wanting to bring back SOPA.
Re:
It also has the effect of blaming tools for the misuse people make of them. If someone beats someone else to death with a hammer, nobody screams for all hammers to be taken off the market, leaving people without the ability to pound in a nail, but sales may be restricted to prevent future misuse.
The bigger picture - longevity
Some years ago I was at a meeting where the issue of electronic data longevity was the issue. Physical media, rock carvings, clay tablets, papyrus, vellum, and even paper, last a long time, remain human readable without technology, and fragments are readable, even, as we recently saw, extracting words from charred scrolls at Pompeii, with advanced AI and scanning techniques.
Digital files are not so readable. File formats come and go, bit rot in storage media, and obsolete hardware, all conspire to “disappear” electronic information in a startlingly short period. Distributed access is one thing that increases redundancy against loss, but the ephemeral nature of the information and its storage, conflicts with this means of preserving information. Even if we had government storage archives of electronic data, equivalent to the Library of Congress for physically published media, would these data centers be useful a century, or a millennium into the future?
The Library at Alexandria proved a nearly single point of failure. But suppose all scrolls had been electronically converted and dispersed to many places, would any of those storage media survive and be readable in any way today?
We may well be enabling an “information dark age” for the future.