"Vanishing" Open Access Journals

A news headline in Science reports that "Dozens of Scientific Journals Have Vanished from the Internet, and No One Preserved Them" (doi:10.1126/science.abe6998). If the reporter is talking about many of the journals described on this blog, a first thought is "Good riddance!".

But from the description of the unpublished study reported on, it impossible to know how many of the evaporating journals contained anything of importance. The undifferentiated finding is that 84 "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." But "[a]bout half of the journals were published by research institutions or scholarly societies," which distinguishes them from the dubious journals discussed here. None of the "vanished" journals were from commercial publishers.

"The authors—Laakso, Lisa Matthias of the Free University of Berlin, and Najko Jahn of the University of Göttingen—defined a vanished journal as one that published at least one complete volume as immediate OA, and less than 50% of its content is now available for free online." As such, the 200 or so journals have not all simply disappeared, and "[s]ome of the content may be accessible as printed copies or in paywalled commercial services."

How significant is it that "[t]he journals had been based in 50 different countries, most of them high-income ones" and that "[m]ost of the lost journals published articles only in English"? If being "based" in a high-income country means advertising an office in the US, Canada, or Europe, well, using a fake address and publishing only in English seems to occur with some frequency.