A part of a series: The Internet Archive as Research Library
Written by Caralee Adams
When gathering evidence for a court case or researching human rights violations, Lili Siri Spira often found that the material she needed was preserved by the Internet Archive.
In Spira’s work, the Wayback Machine has played an integral role in providing stamped artifacts and metadata.
For example, when researching the Bolivian coup in 2019, she wanted to learn more about the sentiment of indigenous people toward political leadership. Spira used the Wayback Machine to examine how indigenous Bolivian websites had changed since 2009. She discovered after initial criticism, some websites seemed to have disappeared.
“The great thing about the Internet Archive is that it really protects the chain of custody,” Spira said. “It’s not only that you look back, but you can even find a website now and capture it in time with the metadata.”
In 2020, The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Violations provided global guidelines for using public digital information as evidence in international criminal and human rights investigations. Spira said this allows preserved website data to be used in court proceedings to hold parties accountable.
On other occasions, Spira has investigated companies suspected of unethical practices. Sometimes executives openly admitted to certain behaviors, only to later deny their action. Companies may attempt to erase past communication, but Spira said she can uncover the previous versions of websites through the Wayback Machine.
“Our knowledge is not being held sacred by many people in this country and around the world,” Spira said. “It’s incredibly important for research work in any field to have access to preserved [digital] information—especially when that research is making certain allegations against powerful entities and corporations.”
We thank Lili and her colleagues for sharing their story for how they use the Internet Archive’s collections in their work.
The Internet Archive launched the Empowering Libraries campaign in 2020 to defend equal access to library services for all. Since then, threats to libraries have only grown, so our fight continues. As 2022 draws to a close, here’s a look back through some of our library’s milestones and accomplishments over the year.
In the news
When the war in Ukraine started, volunteers began using the Wayback Machine and other online tools to preserve Ukrainian websites and digital collections. The effort, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), now has more than 1,500 volunteers working to preserve more than 5,000 web sites and 50TB of data.
Watch a compelling story about SUCHO from CBS News featuring Quinn Dombrowski, one of the project leaders from Stanford University, and Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine.
In May, we partnered with Better World Books on a book drive supporting Ukrainian scholars. BWB customers were able to donate $1 at checkout to acquire books cited in the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia for the Internet Archive to preserve, digitize, and link to citations in Wikipedia.
In October, we introducedDemocracy’s Library, a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world. We hosted an in-person celebration that highlighted the critical importance of free and open access to government publications, and have continued framing out what Democracy’s Library is and why it’s necessary.
Internet Archive Canada opened its new headquarters in Vancouver, BC, alongside the Association of Canadian Archivists 2022 Conference.
More than 1,000 authors have spoken out on behalf of libraries, demanding that publishers and trade associations put the digital rights of librarians, readers, and authors ahead of shareholder profits.
In a tumultuous year on social media, Internet Archive has added a Mastodon server. Why? We need a game with many winners, not just a few powerful players.
In an OpEd for TIME, Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, warned, “the instability occasioned by Twitter’s change in ownership has revealed an underlying instability in our digital information ecosystem.”
The internet reacts to the lawsuit against our library
On July 7, 2022, the Internet Archive filed a motion for summary judgment, asking a federal judge to rule in our favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending. Check out the Hachette v. Internet Archivepage at EFF for all filings and resources.
Interest in the lawsuit crossed over into mainstream channels following a viral tweet about the filing, which kicked off a lengthy online conversation about library rights, digital lending and digital ownership.
After a series of standard filings across the summer and early fall, on October 8, Internet Archive filed the final brief in support of our motion for summary judgment, asking the Court to dismiss the lawsuit because our lending program is a fair use.
What does the lawsuit mean for the future of libraries? Internet Archive’s policy counsel, Peter Routhier, considers how the publishers view libraries based on their filings.
Check out the Hachette v. Internet Archivepage at EFF for all filings and resources.
One message really resonated online—people were surprised to learn that the Internet Archive has a physical archive that preserves all the physical books we’ve acquired and digitized.
eBooks, #OwnBooks & digital ownership
2022 might go down as the year that people started to really understand what it means when libraries & individuals can no longer own content, like when streaming-only content vanishes from media platforms.
Musician Max Collinswrote in Popula how “owning media is now an act of countercultural defiance,” walking readers through his first-hand example of how the streaming model doesn’t work for artists, only corporations.
Brewster Kahle published, “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books,” countering the notion put forward by publishers that ebooks don’t wear out. In fact, Brewster notes that ebooks require “constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read.”
Brewster’s post sparked the interest of LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik, who expanded on the issues around digital ownership in “Here’s why you can’t ‘own’ your ebooks.”
To celebrate why it’s important to own books, and to help bring visibility to issues around digital ownership, we launched the participatory #OwnBooks campaign, which invited people to share photos with the oldest book, or most treasured volume, from their personal collection, like this signed copy of The Phantom Tollbooth.
Author Glyn Moody published his latest book, Walled Culture, as a free ebook that you can download and own, or as a physical book that you can purchase in print.
More publishers joined the movement to sell—not license—ebooks to libraries, including independent publisher 11:11 Press.
The future of libraries
In February, we launched Library as Laboratory, a new series exploring the computational use of Internet Archive collections. The series included segments from digital humanities scholars, computational scientists, web archiving professionals and other researchers.
To help librarians and other information professionals better understand the decentralized web, Internet Archive partnered with the Metropolitan New York Library Council, DWeb, and Library Futures for a six-part series, Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web.
During this year’s National Library Week, we invited readers to Meet the Librarians who work at the Internet Archive, highlighting the new roles our librarians lead in support of our mission, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
Internet Archive joined with Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation and others in the Movement for a Better Internet, a collaborative effort to ensure that the internet’s evolution is guided by public interest values.
Dave Hansen, one of the authors of the white paper on controlled digital lending, was named the new executive director of Authors Alliance.
Carl Malamudreceived this year’s Internet Archive Hero Award for his lifelong mission to make public information freely available to the public.
We hosted the first in-person Library Leaders Forum in three years, preceded by a virtual Forum that brought together hundreds of digital library enthusiasts to explore issues related to digital ownership and the future of library collections.
We hosted a joint webinar with OCLC about our resource sharing pilots, including how to request articles from the Internet Archive via interlibrary loan.
We began gathering content to support the newly announced Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), and then quickly surpassed 25,000 items in the collection.
DISCMASTER, a new software tool, allows users to search across the contents of the tens of thousands of archived CD-ROMs at the Internet Archive.
Colgate Universitydonated more than 1.5 million microfiche cards for preservation and digitization, covering topics including Census data, documents from the Department of Education, Congressional testimony, CIA documents, and foreign news translated into English.
Facing an uncertain future, Hong Kong bookstore owner Albert Wan closed his pro-democracy, independent bookstore and donated the books to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization.
Do you have physical collections you’d like to donate to the Internet Archive? Check out our help document.
In the six weeks since announcing that Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), the project has quickly grown to more than 25,000 items, including ham radio newsletters, podcasts, videos, books, and catalogs. The project seeks additional contributions of material for the free online library.
You are welcome to explore the content currently in the library and watch the primary collection as it grows at https://archive.org/details/dlarc.
The new material includes historical and modern newsletters from diverse amateur radio groups including the National Radio Club (of Aurora, CO); the Telford & District Amateur Radio Society, based in the United Kingdom; the Malta Amateur Radio League; and the South African Radio League. The Tri-State Amateur Radio Society contributed more than 200 items of historical correspondence, newspaper clippings, ham festival flyers, and newsletters. Other publications include Selvamar Noticias, a multilingual digital ham radio magazine; and Florida Skip, an amateur radio newspaper published from 1957 through 1994.The library also includes the complete run of 73 Magazine — more than 500 issues — which are freely and openly available.
More than 300 radio related books are available in DLARC via controlled digital lending. These materials may be checked out by anyone with a free Internet Archive account for a period of one hour to two weeks. Radio and communications books donated to Internet Archive are scanned and added to the DLARC lending library.
Amateur radio podcasts and video channels are also among the first batch of material in the DLARC collection. These include Ham Nation, Foundations of Amateur Radio, the ICQ Amateur/Ham Radio Podcast, with many more to come. Providing a mirror and archive for “born digital” content such as video and podcasts is one of the core goals of DLARC.
Additions to DLARC also include presentations recorded at radio communications conferences, including GRCon, the GNU Radio Conference; and the QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo. A growing reference library of past radio product catalogs includes catalogs from Ham Radio Outlet and C. Crane.
DLARC is growing to be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications. It is funded by a significant grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a digital library that documents, preserves, and provides open access to the history of this community.
Anyone with material to contribute to the DLARC library, questions about the project, or interest in similar digital library building projects for other professional communities, please contact:
Kay Savetz, K6KJN Program Manager, Special Collections kay@archive.org Mastodon: dlarc@mastodon.radio
Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), which will be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications. The DLARC is funded by a significant grant from the Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC), a private foundation, to create a digital library that documents, preserves, and provides open access to the history of this community.
The library will be a free online resource that combines archived digitized print materials, born-digital content, websites, oral histories, personal collections, and other related records and publications. The goals of the DLARC are to document the history of amateur radio and to provide freely available educational resources for researchers, students, and the general public. This innovative project includes:
A program to digitize print materials, such as newsletters, journals, books, pamphlets, physical ephemera, and other records from both institutions, groups, and individuals.
A digital archiving program to archive, curate, and provide access to “born-digital” materials, such as digital photos, websites, videos, and podcasts.
A personal archiving campaign to ensure the preservation and future access of both print and digital archives of notable individuals and stakeholders in the amateur radio community.
Conducting oral history interviews with key members of the community.
Preservation of all physical and print collections donated to the Internet Archive.
The DLARC project is looking for partners and contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small. In addition to physical material to digitize, we are looking for podcasts, newsletters, video channels, and other digital content that can enrich the DLARC collections. Internet Archive will work directly with groups, publishers, clubs, individuals, and others to ensure the archiving and perpetual access of contributed collections, their physical preservation, their digitization, and their online availability and promotion for use in research, education, and historical documentation. All collections in this digital library will be universally accessible to any user and there will be a customized access and discovery portal with special features for research and educational uses.
We are extremely grateful to ARDC for funding this project and are very excited to work with this community to explore a multi-format digital library that documents and ensures access to the history of a specific, noteworthy community. Anyone with material to contribute to the DLARC library, questions about the project, or interest in similar digital library building projects for other professional communities, please contact:
Kay Savetz, K6KJN Program Manager, Special Collections kay@archive.org Twitter: @KaySavetz
To celebrate National Library Week 2022, we are taking readers behind the scenes to Meet the Librarians who work at the Internet Archive and in associated programs.
Sawood Alam was born and raised on a farm in a remote village of India with no smartphones, television or electricity.
Sawood Alam
“Books were one of the only means of learning and entertainment for us,” said Alam, who checked out as many books as he could from his school library every Thursday. “I had to take my buffalo out every afternoon. It was a boring task out in the field with no one to talk to, so books were my companions.”
When he was 10 years old, Alam helped at his school library, which was all run by children. He said he learned a lot about sorting, indexing and categorizing books—the beginning of a lifelong passion.
Alam joined the staff of the Internet Archive as a web and data scientist in 2020. Working with the Wayback Machine team, Alam supports researchers from all around the world conducting analyses with Internet Archive collections. When someone has a research question that involves interaction with Wayback Machine APIs or downloading a large number of archived web pages, he helps prepare the data and provides technical assistance. Alam tries to improve the discoverability of items in massive web collections. His data insights and quality assurance efforts enhance web crawling and Wayback Machine operations.
Alam also collaborates with partners from academia, industry, and organizations on various research, development and standardization efforts. His own research has focused on archive profiling, interoperability and cooperation among archives, which are all topics the data scientist writes about and shares on Twitter.
“My first language is Urdu so when I see books and materials in Urdu in the Internet Archive it brings me joy.”
Sawood Alam, Wayback Machine
Formal academic training in the field of web archiving is uncommon, said Alam. With his background, he’s able to understand the data scientists’ research needs, he said, making his skills a perfect match for his position at the Internet Archive.
“‘Universal Access to All Knowledge’ is something that certainly resonates for me,” Alam said of the Internet Archive’s mission. “I would like to focus on making it more global.”
Beyond his work at the Internet Archive, Alam serves the digital library and web archiving communities by peer-reviewing research papers and chairing sessions in journals and conferences in the fields of his interest and participating in conversations of International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) with focus towards interoperability, collaborations, and other related topics.
Favorite items in the Internet Archive for Alam? “I established a volunteer-driven online Unicode Urdu books library, UrduWeb Digital Library, during my graduation years. My first language is Urdu so when I see books and materials in Urdu in the Internet Archive it brings me joy. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to narrate the lost story of the evolution of Urdu blogging on the 20th anniversary of the Internet Archive.”
In celebration of National Library Week, we’d like to introduce you to some of the professional librarians who work at the Internet Archive and in projects closely associated with our programs. Over the next two weeks, you’ll hear from librarians and other information professionals who are using their education and training in library science and related fields to support the Internet Archive’s patrons.
What draws librarians to work at the Internet Archive? From patron services to collection management to web archiving, the answers are as varied as the departments in which these professionals work. But a common theme emerges from the profiles—that of professionals wanting to use their skills and knowledge in support of the Internet Archive’s mission: “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
We hope that over these next two weeks you’ll learn something about the librarians working behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, and you’ll come to appreciate the training and dedication that influence their daily work. We’re pleased to help you “Meet the Librarians” during this National Library Week and beyond:
Jessamyn West, accessibility – Vermont Mutual Aid Society
As the war intensifies in Ukraine, volunteers from around the world are working to archive digital content at risk of destruction or manipulation. The Internet Archive is supporting several preservation efforts including the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) initiative launched in early March.
“When we think about the internet, we think the data is always going to be there. But all this data exists on physical servers and they can get destroyed just like buildings and monuments,” said Quinn Dombrowski, academic technology specialist at Stanford University and co-founder of SUCHO. “A tremendous amount of effort and energy has gone into the development of these websites and digitized collections. The people of Ukraine put them together for a reason. They wanted to share their history, culture, language and literature with the world.”
Watch:
More than 1,200 volunteers with SUCHO have saved 10 terabytes of data including 14,000 uploaded items (images and PDFs) and captured parts of 2,300 websites so far. This includes material from Ukrainian museums, library websites, digital exhibits, open access publications and elsewhere.
The initiative is using a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content. Some of the information is stored at the Internet Archive, where it can be discovered and accessed using open-source software.
Staff at the Internet Archive are committed to assisting with the effort, which aligns with the organization’s mission of universal access to knowledge, and aim to make the web more useful and reliable, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine.
“This is a pivotal time in history,” he said. “We’re seeing major powers engaged in a war and it’s happening in the internet age where the platforms for information sharing and access we have built, and rely on, the Internet and the Web, are at risk.”
The Internet Archive is documenting and making information accessible that might not otherwise be available, Graham said. For years, the Wayback Machine has been archiving about 950 Russian news sites and 350 Ukrainian news sites. Stories that are deleted or altered are being archived for the historical record.
“We’re seeing major powers engaged in a war and it’s happening in the internet age where the platforms for information sharing and access…are at risk.”
Mark Graham, director, Wayback Machine
Recognizing the urgency of this moment, Dombrowski has been stunned by the response to help from archivists, scholars, librarians involved in cultural heritage and the general public. Volunteers need not have technical expertise or special language skills to be of value in the project.
“Many people were spending the days before they got involved with SUCHO scrolling the news and feeling helpless and wishing they could do something to contribute more directly towards helping out with the situation,” Dombrowski said. “It’s been really inspiring hearing the stories that people have told about what it’s meant to them to be able to be part of something like this.”
Gudrun Wirtz, head of the East European Department of the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) in Munich, was archiving on a smaller scale when she and other colleagues began to collaborate with SUCHO.
“We are committed to Ukraine’s heritage and horrified by this war against the people and their rich culture and the distorting of history going on,” Wirtz said. “As Germans we are especially shocked and reminded of our historical responsibility, because last time Ukraine was invaded it was 1941 by Nazi-Germany. We try to do everything we can at the moment.”
Anna Kiljas, Tufts University
The invasion of Ukraine hits particularly close to home for Anna Kijas, a librarian at Tufts University and co-founder of SUCHO, who is a Polish immigrant with family members who lived through Soviet occupation following WWII.
“Contributing to the SUCHO effort is something tangible that I can do and bring my expertise as a librarian and digital humanist in order to help preserve as much of the cultural heritage of the Ukrainian people as is possible,” said Kijas.
The third co-founder SUCHO, Sebastian Majstorovic, is with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage.
The Internet Archive is providing technical support, tools and training to assist volunteers, including those with SUCHO, who are giving of their time.
Through Archive-It, a customizable self-service web archiving platform that captures, stores, and provides access to web-based content, free online accounts have been offered to volunteer archivists. Mirage Berry, business development manager for Archive-It, has coordinated support with other preservation partners including the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, and East European & Central Asian Studies Collections librarian Liladhar Pendse at University of California, Berkeley.
“It’s so incredible how quickly all of these archivists have pulled together to do this,” Berry said. “Everyone wants to do something. You don’t need to have a ton of technical experience. For anyone who is willing to learn, it’s a great jumping off point for web archiving.”
SUCHO organizers anticipate after the immediate emergency of website archiving is over, there will be an ongoing need to stay vigilant with data curation of Ukrainian material. To learn more and get involved, visit http://www.sucho.org.
In July, we announced our partnership with the Archives Unleashed project as part of our ongoing effort to make new services available for scholars and students to study the archived web. Joining the curatorial power of our Archive-It service, our work supporting text and data mining, and Archives Unleashed’s in-browser analysis tools will open up new opportunities for understanding the petabyte-scale volume of historical records in web archives.
As part of our partnership, we are releasing a series of publicly available datasets created from archived web collections. Alongside these efforts, the project is also launching a Cohort Program providing funding and technical support for research teams interested in studying web archive collections. These twin efforts aim to help build the infrastructure and services to allow more researchers to leverage web archives in their scholarly work. More details on the new public datasets and the cohorts program are below.
Early Web Datasets
Our first in a series of public datasets from the web collections are oriented around the theme of the early web. These are, of course, datasets intended for data mining and researchers using computational tools to study large amounts of data, so are absent the informational or nostalgia value of looking at archived webpages in the Wayback Machine. If the latter is more your interest, here is an archived Geocities page with unicorn GIFs.
GeoCities Collection (1994–2009)
As one of the first platforms for creating web pages without expertise, Geocities lowered the barrier of entry for a new generation of website creators. There were at least 38 million pages displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated by Yahoo! in 2009. This dataset collection contains a number of individual datasets that include data such as domain counts, image graph and web graph data, and binary file information for a variety of file formats like audio, video, and text and image files. A graphml file is also available for the domain graph.
Friendster was an early and widely used social media networking site where users were able to establish and maintain layers of shared connections with other users. This dataset collection contains graph files that allow data-driven research to explore how certain pages within Friendster linked to each other. It also contains a dataset that provides some basic metadata about the individual files within the archival collection.
These two related datasets were generated from the Internet Archive’s global web archive collection. The first dataset, “Parallel Language Records of the Early Web (1996–1999)” provides a dataset of multilingual records, or URLs of websites that have the same text represented in multiple languages. Such multi-language text from websites are a rich source for parallel language corpora and can be valuable in machine translation. The second dataset, “Language Annotations of the Early Web (1996–1999)” is another metadata set that annotates the language of over four million websites using Compact Language Detector (CLD3).
Applications are now being accepted from research teams interested in performing computational analysis of web archive data. Five cohorts teams of up to five members each will be selected to participate in the program from July 2021 to June 2022. Teams will:
Participate in cohort events, training, and support, with a closing event held at Internet Archive, in San Francisco, California, USA tentatively in May 2022. Prior events will be virtual or in-person, depending on COVID-19 restrictions
Receive bi-monthly mentorship via support meetings with the Archives Unleashed team
Work in the Archive-It Research Cloud to generate custom datasets
Receive funding of $11,500 CAD to support project work. Additional support will be provided for travel to the Internet Archive event
Looking for a research paper but can’t find a copy in your library’s catalog or popular search engines? Give Internet Archive Scholar a try! We might have a PDF from a “vanished” Open Access publisher in our web archive, an author’s pre-publication manuscript from their archived faculty webpage, or a digitized microfilm version of an older publication.
We hope Internet Archive Scholar will aid researchers and librarians looking for specific open access papers that may not be otherwise available to them. Judith van Stegeren (@jd7g on Twitter), a PhD candidate in the Netherlands, encountered just such a situation recently when sharing a workshop paper on procedural generation in computer games: “Towards Qualitative Procedural Generation” by Mark R. Johnson, originally presented at the Computational Creativity & Games Workshop in 2016. The papers for this particular year of the workshop are not indexed in the usual bibliographic catalogs, and the original workshop website hosting the Open Access papers is no longer accessible. Fortunately, copies of all the 2016 workshop papers were captured in the Wayback Machine, and can be found today by searching IA Scholar by title or conference name.
As another example, dozens of papers from the Open Journal of Hematology are no longer resolvable via DOI. As mentioned in a previous blog post, the publisher’s website vanished and has been replaced with unrelated advertisements. But before that happened, the papers were captured in the Wayback Machine, indexed in our catalog, and can now be searched in full:
IA Scholar Search Results
IA Scholar is a simple, access-oriented interface to content identified across several Internet Archive collections, including web archives, archive.org files, and digitized print materials. The full text of articles is searchable for users that are hunting for particular phrases or keywords. This complements our existing full-text search index of millions of digitized books and other documents on archive.org.
The service builds on Fatcat, an open catalog we have developed to identify at-risk and web-published open scholarly outputs that can benefit from long-term preservation, additional metadata, and perpetual access. Fatcat includes resources that may be useful to librarians and archivists, such as bulk metadata dumps, a read/write API, command-line tool, and file-level archival metadata. If you are interested in collaborating with us, or are a researcher interested in text analysis applications, we have a public chat channel or can be contacted by email at info@archive.org.
IA Scholar marks a milestone in our work initiated in 2018 to leverage the automation and scale of web and API harvesting in providing open infrastructure for the preservation of and perpetual access to scholarly materials from the public web. We particularly want to thank the Mellon Foundation for their original and ongoing support of this work, our many current partners, and the other collaborators, contributors, and volunteers.
All of this is possible because of the incredible open research ecosystem built and collectively maintained by Open Access advocates. Thank you to the DOAJ and other groups for helping catalog open access journals which has aided preservation. Thank you to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and its supporters for digitizing print journal literature. And thank you to the many other organizations we have worked with, integrated, or whose services we have utilized, including open web indices (Unpaywall, CORE, CiteseerX, Microsoft Academic, Semantic Scholar), directories of open journals (DOAJ, ROADSHERPA/ROMEO, JURN, Wikidata), and open bibliographic catalogs (Crossref, Datacite, J-STAGE, Pubmed, dblp).
Internet Archive has archived and identified 9 million open access journal articles– the next 5 million is getting harder
Open Access journals, such as New Theology Review (ISSN: 0896-4297) and Open Journal of Hematology (ISSN: 2075-907X), made their research articles available for free online for years. With a quick click or a simple query, students anywhere in the world could access their articles, and diligent Wikipedia editors could verify facts against original articles on vitamin deficiency and blood donation.
But some journals, such as these titles, are no longer available from the publisher’s websites, and are only available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Since 2017, the Internet Archive joined others in concentrating on archiving all scholarly literature and making it permanently accessible.
The World Wide Web has made it easier than ever for scholars to collaborate, debate, and share their research. Unfortunately, the structure of today’s web means that content can disappear just as easily: as of today the official publisher websites and DOI redirects for both of the above journals go nowhere or have been replaced with unrelated content.
Wayback Machine captures of Open Access journals now “vanished” from publisher websites
Vigilant librarians saw this problem coming decades ago, when the print-to-digital migration was getting started. They insisted that commercial publishers work with contract digital preservation organizations (such as Portico, LOCKSS, and CLOCKSS) to ensure long-term access to expensive journal subscription content. Efforts have been made to preserve open articles as well, such as Public Knowledge Project’s Private LOCKSS Network for OJS journals and national hosting platforms like the SciELO network. But a portion of all scholarly articles continues to fall through the cracks.
Researchers found that 176 open access journals have already vanished from their publishers’ website over the past two decades, according to a recent preprint article by Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn. These periodicals were from all regions of the world and represented all major disciplines — sciences, humanities and social sciences. There are over 14,000 open access journals indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals and the paper suggests another 900 of those are inactive and at risk of disappearing. The pre-print has struck a nerve, receiving news coverage in Nature and Science.
In 2017, with funding support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Kahle/Austin Foundation, the Internet Archive launched a project focused on preserving all publicly accessible research documents, with a particular focus on open access materials. Our first job was to quantify the scale of the problem.
Monitoring independent preservation of Open Access journal articles published from 1996 through 2019. Categories are defined in the article text.
Of the 14.8 million known open access articles published since 1996, the Internet Archive has archived, identified, and made available through the Wayback Machine 9.1 million of them (“bright” green in the chart above). In the jargon of Open Access, we are counting only “gold” and “hybrid” articles which we expect to be available directly from the publisher, as opposed to preprints, such as in arxiv.org or institutional repositories. Another 3.2 million are believed to be preserved by one or more contracted preservation organizations, based on records kept by Keepers Registry (“dark” olive in the chart). These copies are not intended to be accessible to anybody unless the publisher becomes inaccessible, in which case they are “triggered” and become accessible.
This leaves at least 2.4 million Open Access articles at risk of vanishing from the web (“None”, red in the chart). While many of these are still on publisher’s websites, these have proven difficult to archive.
One of our goals is to archive as many of the articles on the open web as we can, and to keep up with the growing stream of new articles published every day. Another is to look back over the vast petabytes of web content in the Wayback Machine, back to 1996, and find any content we might already have but is not easily findable or discoverable. Both of these projects are amenable to software automation, but made more difficult by the evolving nature of HTML and PDFs and their diverse character sets and encodings. To that end, we have approached this project not just as a technical one, but also as a collaborative one that aims to add another piece to the distributed infrastructure supporting open scholarship.
To expand our reach, we built an editable catalog (https://fatcat.wiki) with an open API to allow anybody to contribute. As the software is free and open source, as is the data, we invite others to reuse and link to the content we have archived. We have also indexed and made searchable much of the literature to help manage our work and help others find if we have archived particular articles. We want to make scholarly material permanently available, and available in new ways– including via large datasets for analysis and “meta research.”
We also want to acknowledge the many partnerships and collaborations that have supported this work, many of which are key parts of the open scholarly infrastructure, including ISSN, DOAJ, LOCKSS, Unpaywall, Semantic Scholar, CiteSeerX, Crossref, Datacite, and many others. We also want to acknowledge the many Internet Archive staff and volunteers that have contributed to this work, including Bryan Newbold, Martin Czygan, Paul Baclace, Jefferson Bailey, Kenji Nagahashi, David Rosenthal, Victoria Reich, Ellen Spertus, and others.
If you would like to participate in this project, please contact the Internet Archive at webservices@archive.org.
