I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that’s right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges the very institutions that produced the knowledge exorbitant rents to access it. It’s all upside. Because they’re the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.

I’d love to see DOI automating a copy of each entry to archive.org. This would improve the likelihood of them remaining available.

Sure, it would make grifters like Elsevier mad, but scientific knowledge worth a DOI entry shouldn’t be limited to a for-profit organisation.

Edit: Worded first para badly. I meant anything assigned a DOI ID, regardless of where the work is hosted.

That’s why we need repositories like the arXiv, the medRxiv and Sci-Hub (aaahr, my pirates!)