I think durability is a really important feature of journal articles. I often read 70 year old articles, and rarely read 70 year old anything else.
I’m not sure what’s responsible for the durability, mind you. Long-term accessibility is necessary, obviously, but not sufficient. Academic citation culture is also part of it, I think.
Zenodo is a pretty accepted solution to data-durability in academia (https://zenodo.org). There’s no reason you couldn’t upload papers there (and indeed they host papers/conference proceedings/etc.). Uploads get assigned a DOI and get versioning, get indexed for citation purposes, etc.
If I were starting a journal it would probably look like “Zenodo for hosting, some AirTable or GitHub workflow for (quick) refereeing/editorial workflow.”
That is true, but I also think journal editors will internalize that. And it’s easy to fetishize this stuff – electronic formats die out, so let’s engrave all our journals on stone tablets! – but arguably, any important article exists in 50 versions on the web, and will eventually be preserved, so long as anyone cares about it. At least, that seems to have happened so far.
I think durability is a really important feature of journal articles. I often read 70 year old articles, and rarely read 70 year old anything else.
I’m not sure what’s responsible for the durability, mind you. Long-term accessibility is necessary, obviously, but not sufficient. Academic citation culture is also part of it, I think.
Zenodo is a pretty accepted solution to data-durability in academia (https://zenodo.org). There’s no reason you couldn’t upload papers there (and indeed they host papers/conference proceedings/etc.). Uploads get assigned a DOI and get versioning, get indexed for citation purposes, etc.
If I were starting a journal it would probably look like “Zenodo for hosting, some AirTable or GitHub workflow for (quick) refereeing/editorial workflow.”
That is true, but I also think journal editors will internalize that. And it’s easy to fetishize this stuff – electronic formats die out, so let’s engrave all our journals on stone tablets! – but arguably, any important article exists in 50 versions on the web, and will eventually be preserved, so long as anyone cares about it. At least, that seems to have happened so far.