Study: ~180 online-only, open-access science, social sciences, and humanities journals have disappeared in the last 20 years and their content wasn't preserved
Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities …
Context & Ripple Effects
Open access was sold on permanence — no paywall between a reader and a paper — but this study shows the model has a durability gap: roughly 180 online-only OA journals across the sciences and the social sciences and humanities vanished over two decades, taking their content with them. The finding lands alongside broader evidence of digital decay, including Pew's estimate that 38% of webpages accessible in 2013 are now gone.
The coverage also hints at who ends up holding the bag when formal preservation fails: projects like the effort to stabilize Library Genesis exist precisely because the legitimate scholarly infrastructure leaves gaps that informal, often pirated archives fill.
First-order effects
- Researchers who published in these journals lose citable versions of their own work, and anyone citing those papers hits dead links — the journal's disappearance erases both the record and its provenance.
- Librarians and indexers lose catalog entries for content that was never deposited anywhere else, since online-only journals had no print backstop.
Second-order effects
- Shadow libraries like LibGen become de facto preservation infrastructure by default, which pushes more of the scholarly record into legally precarious hands whenever official archives fail.
- Funders and universities face pressure to require repository deposit at publication rather than trusting publishers' servers, shifting archiving costs from journals to institutional infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'open access' splits into two tiers — OA backed by mandated long-term archival deposit versus OA that is one server failure from extinction — and preservation status becomes part of how journals are judged.
- The broader erosion of the web documented by link-rot research suggests scholarship will increasingly depend on dedicated preservation bodies (libraries, archives, initiatives like LOCKSS-style replication) rather than on any publisher's continued existence.
The trend: As the scholarly record moves fully online, its survival is decoupling from publishers and becoming contingent on ad hoc archives and informal preservation efforts.