Digital opportunity for the academic scholarly record
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 4:10 am
[MIT Libraries is holding a workshop on Grand Challenges for the scholarly record. They asked participants for a problem/solution statement. This is mine. -brewster kahle]
The problem of academic scholarly record now:
University library budgets are spent on closed rather than open: We telemarketing data invest dollars in closed/subscription services (Elsevier, JSTOR, Hathi) rather than ones open to all users (PLOS, Arxiv, Internet Archive, eBird)– and for a reason. There is only so much money and our community demands access to closed services, and the open ones are there whether we pay for them or not.
We want open access AND digital curation and preservation– but have no means to spend cooperatively.
University libraries funded the building of Elsevier / JSTOR / HathiTrust: closed, subscription services.
We need to invest most University Library acquisition dollars in open: PLOS, Arxiv, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, eBird.
We have solved it when:
Anyone anywhere can get ALL information available to an MIT student, for free.
Everyone everywhere has the opportunity to contribute to the scholarly record as if they were MIT faculty, for free.
What should we do now?
Analog -> Digital conversion of all published scholarly must be completed soon. And completely open, available in bulk.
Curation and Digital Preservation of born-digital research products: papers/websites/research data.
“Multi-homing” digital research product (papers, websites, research data) via peer-to-peer backends.
Who can best implement?
Vision and tech ability: Internet Archive, PLOS, Wikipedia, arxiv.
Funding now is coming from researchers, individuals, rich people.
Funding should come from University Library acquisition budgets.
It’s been a little over 4 years since the Internet Archive started providing emulation in the browser from our software collection; millions of plays of games, utilities, and everything else that shows up on a screen have happened since then. While we continue to refine the technology (including adding Webassembly as an option for running the emulations), we also have tried to expand out to various platforms, computers, and anything else that we can, based on the work of the emulation community, especially the MAME Development Team.
For a number of years, the MAME team has been moving towards emulating a class of hardware and software that, for some, stretches the bounds of what emulation can do, and we have now put up a collection of some of their efforts here at archive.org.
The problem of academic scholarly record now:
University library budgets are spent on closed rather than open: We telemarketing data invest dollars in closed/subscription services (Elsevier, JSTOR, Hathi) rather than ones open to all users (PLOS, Arxiv, Internet Archive, eBird)– and for a reason. There is only so much money and our community demands access to closed services, and the open ones are there whether we pay for them or not.
We want open access AND digital curation and preservation– but have no means to spend cooperatively.
University libraries funded the building of Elsevier / JSTOR / HathiTrust: closed, subscription services.
We need to invest most University Library acquisition dollars in open: PLOS, Arxiv, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, eBird.
We have solved it when:
Anyone anywhere can get ALL information available to an MIT student, for free.
Everyone everywhere has the opportunity to contribute to the scholarly record as if they were MIT faculty, for free.
What should we do now?
Analog -> Digital conversion of all published scholarly must be completed soon. And completely open, available in bulk.
Curation and Digital Preservation of born-digital research products: papers/websites/research data.
“Multi-homing” digital research product (papers, websites, research data) via peer-to-peer backends.
Who can best implement?
Vision and tech ability: Internet Archive, PLOS, Wikipedia, arxiv.
Funding now is coming from researchers, individuals, rich people.
Funding should come from University Library acquisition budgets.
It’s been a little over 4 years since the Internet Archive started providing emulation in the browser from our software collection; millions of plays of games, utilities, and everything else that shows up on a screen have happened since then. While we continue to refine the technology (including adding Webassembly as an option for running the emulations), we also have tried to expand out to various platforms, computers, and anything else that we can, based on the work of the emulation community, especially the MAME Development Team.
For a number of years, the MAME team has been moving towards emulating a class of hardware and software that, for some, stretches the bounds of what emulation can do, and we have now put up a collection of some of their efforts here at archive.org.