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by bnewbold 923 days ago
This is exactly the problem that the Internet Archive created their Scholar project to mitigate (https://scholar.archive.org/about). The https://fatcat.wiki component acts as a dashboard to track preservation of scholarly publications across multiple efforts. There are a bunch of projects in this area, including LOCKSS ("lots of copies keep stuff safe", including some fun/novel uses of cryptography), Scielo and similar regional platforms and archives (primarily outside the US/EU), Pubmed Central, etc. Zenodo (CERN) and figshare end up being an accessible option for some small journals. There are definitely gaps that content falls through and gets lost.

A few folks have mentioned shadow libraries like Sci-Hub. These efforts can play an archival role, but tend to focus on access, which means there is not as much attention on content which is freely available today, but could disappear in the future.

A common dynamic here is that clout and funding flows to globally prestigious publications, and there is a bias against marginal publications. For sure there are many content-farms and scammy publications, but a lot of gems and valuable small publications get bundled in and dismissed.

Some more references and reading for folks interested in this subject: https://guide.fatcat.wiki/bibliography.html

(I helped create Scholar, but don't currently work at Internet Archive)