Eighty- four online-only, open access (OA) journals in the sciences, and about 170 in the social sciences and humanities(人文学科)，have disappeared from the Internet over the past 2 decades. A study has found these journals ended up falling offline within several years after their first publication as they were not kept in good condition for some reason. An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at high risk of disappearing because they are inactive.
"There is usually a vast amount of time contributed by a lot of people behind every article, from the authors to the editors, all the way to peer-reviewers", Mikael Laakso, a co-author of the study, explained." The fact that all the previous online scholarly records are cut off from the world on which they once made a positive impact, for not having enough maintenance, is totally unacceptable."
A new initiative set by research funders requires maintenance systems—but most online-only journals currently lack such plans. The new preservation system requires scholars to make their articles immediately free to read upon publication. Overall, only about one-third of the 14, 068 online journals published in 2019 ensure the long term preservation of their content while the rest of them are estimated to go dark in a few years.
It's not clear how many subscription-based journals also have gone dark in recent years. Subscription-based content has historically been better covered by libraries, either by having paper copies on shelves or electronically. There have been established processes and budgets in place for libraries to preserve purchased content, which put subscription-based journals in the catbird seat, when it comes to preservation. However, what is just available for anyone to download for free has not been brought into such processes and thus runs the risk of disappearing.
There's little consensus about who is ultimately responsible for the digital preservation of OA journals—publishers, libraries, or universities. Preserving OA journals may pose a particularly big financial challenge for those publishers that do not charge authors for the publication of their articles. Library budgets, meanwhile, have faced cuts. And preservation sometimes seems less important than working on the articles which European funders often use to evaluate the quality of university scholarship.
