Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet

An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge.

More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January 2024, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output. Eve’s study suggests some measures that could improve digital preservation.