I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that's right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges the very institutions that produced the knowledge exorbitant rents to access it. It's all upside. Because they're the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.

That's why we need repositories like the arXiv, the medRxiv and Sci-Hub (aaahr, my pirates!)

Aaron Swartz would like a word.

I'd love to see DOI automating a copy of each entry to archive.org. This would improve the likelihood of them remaining available.

Sure, it would make grifters like Elsevier mad, but scientific knowledge worth a DOI entry shouldn't be limited to a for-profit organisation.

Edit: Worded first para badly. I meant anything assigned a DOI ID, regardless of where the work is hosted.

It's interesting reading quotes from that article like: "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." and "After you’ve been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you’ve worked on?"

It reminds me of problems the US military is having with refitting/upgrading old ICBMs. From the 2021 article, "Minuteman III Missiles Are Too Old to Upgrade Anymore, STRATCOM Chief Says": "Where the drawings do exist, "they're like six generations behind the industry standard," he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. "They're not alive anymore."

It's sounds like the danger is we'll be able to access the science (or just trust it's true) but in some cases we'll be unable to retrace our steps.

quick, somebody go call the datahoarder community

...and whose fault is that, private publishing industry? Hmmm? Who didn't invest here?

Also #politics for allowing it to happen of course.

I wonder how many of those are freely accessible in libgen.

Aw man that's real sad

This sounds like a situation where a "distributed append-only ledger" might actually be useful for once?