Hundreds of scientific journals have disappeared from the web. And so we lost a lot of articles

Between 2000 and 2019 176 open-access scientific journals ceased to exist, and with them most of their content

(image: Getty Images) It is said that once a content is online it is very difficult to make it completely disappear from circulation. Yet it seems that between 2000 and 2019 over 100 open-access scientific journals have vanished, making their publications essentially unavailable. Reporting the problem in an analysis published on arXiv is the team of Mikael Laakso of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, who believes that the phenomenon can be much more extensive and amplify over time.

The vulnerable science

Laakso and his colleagues searched databases such as Doaj, Ulrichsweb and Scopus to create a list of open-access online publications. To find out if they still existed, they crossed the titles with the Keepers Registry archive, which keeps track of the journals registered in digital preservation programs.

For journals no longer available they consulted Wayback Machine, which instead keeps snapshots of websites. Thus they were able to verify when they had published for the last time and when they had disappeared from the web - where by disappearance we mean that less than 50% of their content is still online.

Between 2000 and 2019 ne identified 176, which disappeared within 5 years of the last publication (one third within a year).