More than 2 million research papers have disappeared from the Internet

An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge.

by Sarah Wild

More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January1, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.

“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”

Eve, who is also involved in research and development at digital-infrastructure organization Crossref, checked whether 7,438,037 works labelled with digital object identifiers (DOIs) are held in archives...

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Source: Pullum 1984: Punctuation and human freedom

Got a crush on the really cool professor in my major that I absolutely do not expect to go anywhere but I see other students be normal friendly with him and want to do that too without exposing my horrific secret, what do I do?

what you need to do is put him on the back foot as much as possible. best way to do this is to confuse him with whatever slang is too new or too online for him to be aware of. use this constantly in his presence so he's always thinking damn, i'm not hot shit at all, i don't even know what this student is saying to me. knock him down a few pegs.

another thing i think you should do is look up his publications. see if he has beef with any other academics in the field (has anyone written a letter to the editor disagreeing with one of his articles? if he's submitted to journals that publish reviewer comments, has he gotten any scathing peer reviews?), then cite his nemeses incessantly in your papers. has he published in the field's high-impact factor journals? if not, ask him for tips on getting published. (this is like "do you even lift, bro?" but for academics.) if you're not comfortable saying any of this stuff to him, it should be sufficient just to have the information yourself. you need to reduce the mental real estate allocated to being impressed with him. if you cut him down to size, chances are your crush will diminish proportionately and then you can act like a regular human in his presence.

When I get contradictory comments from my peer reviewers...

I am so envious of people whose brains don’t jump from zero to panic at the drop of a hat. Because my current new panic of the day is about how I had my dissertation participants read/watch and react to excerpts from two books and one tv show and now I’m convinced I’m going to be sued for copyright violations by two major publishers and Netflix for using their content.

And why did this come up? Because I was like “I should do the right thing and request permission to add the written excerpts to my appendices” and now I’m freaking out (irrationally) that they’re going to penalize me for using them in the first place. I didn’t even send participants a copy because I just shared my screen. Logically, I know that this doesn’t violate copyright but my brain has dug its anxiety claws into proving that wrong. Why is copyright law so terrifying?

Resources for Academic Publishing

This post I made a while back got quite popular. One of the things that showed up often in the tags is "what about paying for academic publishing?"

Basically, the same idea applies. If a journal approaches you and says "hey, we'll publish your article super fast and your just need to pay us this fee," be wary. Academic publishing is slow by design to allow for the peer review process. Predatory journals will take your money and publish your article, but skip the peer review process that makes sure your research is sound. So if you publish with them, not only will you be out a boatload of money, but your integrity as a researcher will be tainted.

That being said, there are many academic journals that do charge fees to publish with them. This article does a good job explaining the different fees that a journal might have.

Since we live in a capitalist society, academic publishers need to make money. To do this, they have to charge the reader and/or the author. Because the potential audience of an academic article is much smaller than the potential audience for, say, the latest vampire romance, publishers by necessity often have to charge authors to publish.

In the rest of this very long post, I'll try my best to give you an overview of ways to publish your research without breaking the bank.

So what's an aspiring academic to do? You are probably not swimming in cash (I just finished grad school, l feel your pain). That's where the magical world of grants comes in. If you are associated with a college or university, see if they offer publication grants. These are often administered through the library, but they can also be available by a department. At my university, the Graduate and Professional Student Association offered quarterly publication grants of up to $1,200 for graduation students to publish their research. There were several funding cycles a year where nobody would apply, which was always sad. There's money out there, if you know where to look!

Also look at professional organizations in your field. Many offer financial assistance to graduate students through grants or fellowships. When you are applying for a grant, make sure to include publishing expenses in your cost breakdown!! This is something that so many people forget to do. And don't just look at the biggest, national/international organizations in your field. There are probably smaller regional organizations that offer funding as well, and they probably aren't as competitive as those national ones.

A pro tip from me is to think outside of the box in terms of what grants/fellowships you apply to. For example, my research focus is the historical archaeology of caves in the southeast US. So I can apply to grants for research in archaeology, caves, history, historical archaeology, cave archaeology, cave history, southeast American history, southeast American archaeology, etc. Look at your research topic and make a list of all of the different umbrellas it can fit under. Then search for organizations that are related to those projects. You might be surprised by what's out there! And if you're unsure if you research topic fits into the scope of a program, it never hurts to send the coordinator a quick email.

Another option is to carefully consider what journals you submit to. A highly prestigious journal is likely to have higher fees than a less prestigious one. As long as your article is peer reviewed, the prestige of a journal is not as important as you might think (The only time is might be important is if you're trying to get tenure).

If you take nothing else from this post, take this: do not self reject! Imposter syndrome is real, and you might feel that you don't deserve funding. That's the devil talking. You, my friend, are an academic badass. Your research is awesome, you're awesome, and you deserve to share your awesomeness with the world. So apply to that grant, even if you don't think you'll get it. You might be surprised.

An academic question for youse. I'm reading about "grey literature" for work, i.e. material not produced by commercial publishers, and it includes conference proceedings as an example. But then it says that grey literature is not peer reviewed. I've submitted twice to conference proceedings and both articles have undergone peer review; I also know of conference papers that have been rejected by peer reviewers, suggesting a level of selectivity. When it comes to citing articles, I've never particularly distinguished between conference proceedings and journals, as in my field they seem to fulfil very similar functions.

Is this medieval studies being weird and other fields having a wildly different approach, or is this a broader STEM/humanities difference? Or is this page simply incorrect?

We wish women all over the world a Happy Women's Day!

Achieving gender equality and women’s well-being in all aspects of life is more crucial than ever if we want to create prosperous economies and a healthy planet. On the occasion of International Women's Day, let us focus to begin from the start itself to Invest in Women i.e. the Family and work towards a more gender inclusive and equal family, country, and world.

Having been wholly and completely immersed in academia for the past three months, I can confirm three very important and three very related things:

1. Academics fucking love when people want to read their work.

2. Authors don’t get any money from subscriptions to journals they’re published in.

3. Because paywalls directly prevent people from reading their work, authors tend not to like paywalls; similarly, because they receive 0 money from having their work paywalled, they have 0 incentive to encourage subscriptions. In many cases, authors will actively subvert the paywall by posting the article elsewhere or just... sending it to anyone who asks.

So tl;dr literally if you want an article, see if one of the authors has uploaded it to Researchgate. If not, email the authors and ask for them to send it to you.

It’s almost a guarantee that (if they see your email and answer it) they will happily send you the article and maybe a few others that they like. They probably hate paywalls as much as you do and will happily stick it to the greedy subscription journals that limit the paper’s potential audience.

Spotted this at work today... My kind of peer pier review!

Source

So, publishing the Master’s thesis about Ghost has hit a bit of a snag. Because I quote 10 songs, some a great deal (looking at you, “Respite on the Spitalfields” and “Spillways”), I have to somehow figure out who to contact to figure out what I need to do to get permission for academic publishing because fair use is kind of questionable when you use lyrics in even an academic work.

I couldn’t find anything about who to talk to on Loma Vista’s website, so now I’m on their parent company’s website. The only way to contact them about this is through a licensing request form which is both intimidating and confusing. I’m going to try some unconventional means of contacting them to see if they will answer questions (like maybe try some of their socials), but I’m starting to lose hope on publishing this in an academic journal.

I got the position! So excited to be able to say I’m the Digital Research & Scholarship Graduate Assistant at my university’s main library. I’ll be working on projects related to open access initiatives/advocacy, academic publishing, and digital literacy--all areas that I’ve been interested in exploring for a future career.

Still not exactly sure when it starts, but I’ll have to start thinking about what classes I want to take this summer in the meantime...the position requires me to be a full time student, so I’ll go from one to two or three classes per semester. This means I’ll be cutting my hours and/or quitting my job at the coffee shop which has honestly been starting to wear on me anyway.

Even though it’s a remote position and a virtual degree program, this also means I’ll probably be prepping for a move back to the university when my lease is up. 

As exciting as all of this is (you know, all of my plans finally falling into place), it seems like good news hardly ever comes without bad news. I’m waiting on a call from the vet that will more than likely change my cat’s life forever, so I can’t really celebrate how I’d planned. Just hoping we can handle it quickly and everything will be okay in the end. If you’re reading this, I hope you’re hanging in there.