One really good cause for making a donation or charitable gift is the Internet Archive. Preserving the world's knowledge is a worthwhile endeavor especially when people here lament the lost hacker zeitgeist of the 90s Geocities Era Internet.

IA isn't raking in large amounts of $$$ like Google, and a rare good actor like them really could use some support from one of the many fortunate users on this site who won the RSU lottery by simply doing what they love in this unprecedented decade of technology fueled personal wealth.

It would be super interesting to overlay the scale of efforts like this one that follow publisher licenses with those of scihub that ignore them.

The amount of effort we put into curation due to license and the amount of content lost because of our ownership policies seem to be coming more clearly into view as we consider the costs those choices incur.

Thanks Bryan! I'm more interested in the old papers, both public domain and out of commerce, and we have quite some work left to do...

> 1,150,246 30.22% no known independent preservation

https://fatcat.wiki/coverage/search?q=year%3A%3E1800+year%3A...

I love the fatcat, this coverage graph is so nifty. :)

This is a good thing to do, but for once, I'm not sure the Internet Archive is the right entity to do it. I don't think the IA can ensure permanent access to anything at all right now since it's facing an existential threat as a result of its "lend copies of books that belong to other institutions" stunt.

LOCKSS: A Permanent Web Publishing and Access System by Vicky Reich and David S. H. Rosenthal describes a practical system which guarantees survival of published articles even when the hosting journal disappears.

See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.68....

Link back to recent discussion on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422593

I'm curious, is IA also archiving youtube videos?

Has anyone else had serious issues with web.archive.org over the past 6-7 months? I've been experiencing total failures probably 20-30% of the time when I try to archive something, and sometimes even a seemingly successful archival job points to a dead link after indicating completion.

...and that's in addition to things running incredibly slowly in general even when it is functioning properly.

Maybe they should just make all closed access journals available also! What could possibly go wrong?