Science: Just Delete It
September 10, 2020
The information in “Dozens of Scientific Journals Have Vanished from the Internet, and No One Preserved Them” may remind some people that the “world’s information” and the “Internet archives” are marketing sizzle. The steak is the source document. The FBI has used the phrase “going dark” as shorthand for not being able to access certain information. The thrill of not have potentially useful information is one that most researchers prefer to reserve for thrill rides at Legoland.
The write up states:
Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 2 decades as publishers stopped maintaining them, potentially depriving scholars of useful research findings, a study has found. An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at risk of vanishing because they are inactive, says a preprint posted on 3 September on the arXiv server. The number of OA journals tripled from 2009 to 2019, and on average the vanished titles operated for nearly 10 years before going dark, which “might imply that a large number … is yet to vanish…
Flat earthers and those who believe that “just being” is a substitute for academic rigor are probably going to have “thank goodness, these documents are gone” party. I won’t be attending.
Anti-intellectualism is really exciting. Plus, it makes life a lot easier for those in the top one percent of intellectual capability. Why? Extensive reading can fill in some blanks. Who wants to be comprehensive? Oh, I know: “Those who consume TikTok videos and devour Instagram while checking WhatsApp messages.”
Stephen E Arnold, September 10, 2020
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