A new study has found 176 open access journals from 47 countries vanished from the Internet between 2000 and 2019.
What's more, study co-author Mikael Laakso of the Hanken School of Economics says nearly 900 'inactive' journals may be at risk of vanishing in the future.
According to CNN, the issue of insufficient preservation of the scholarly record online has been raised before.
However, study co-author Mikael Laakso says until now, no one had put out names of journals or tried to identify a quantity.
Over 50% of the vanished journals were about social sciences and humanities, along with health, physical science, mathematics, and life sciences.
For all that work to be nullified and cut off from ever making an impact on the world, for such a trivial reason as not having a backup system in place for PDF files is not something that should be accepted. Mikael Laakso Associate Professor, Hanken School of Economics.
