Dear Hive Mind. Looking for good examples from ~2015 of scholarly or scholarly adjacent services/infrastructures failing.
I've got examples of corporate capture, but struggling to find examples of actual closure because they've left very little trace
Friendfeed is one example, alongside a million other social media offerings, but I'm looking for something that the general scholarly reader would recognise and remember ideally
Don't have any citations, but recall hearing a talk at some point about corporate librarians / corporate archives being discontinued.
There was apparently a pretty assiduous tradition of blue chip firms of the 20th century keeping histories of their own accomplishments and transformation over time.
Only for the resources for such long-standing internal institutions to be axed in recent decades.
@cameronneylon does CiteULike count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteULike looks like it closed in 2019, but I can't remember when I stopped using it. I'm not sure if the general scholarly reader will remember this, though. Even FriendFeed was a short bubble compared to Science Twitter
I even found a blog post by you 😅 https://cameronneylon.net/blog/why-the-web-of-data-needs-to-be-social/
@biocs I think CiteULike is a little more complex a story because it gets tied up with market challenges after the Mendeley purchase but its a good find.
And yes, I keep following rabbit holes back to my own blog - where apparently I didn't actually document many closures, just the purchases...hence the call for help! :-)
@biocs @cameronneylon ah, good one! I was thinking about Connotea, but I think that was MIA for years in 2015 already
(here's some old blog posts, and adding a few more in the next hour: https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/tag/citeulike)
oh, indeeed! "An export tool remained live until April 16, 2013 so that registered users could export their bookmarks."
I have to admit, it felt earlier
There were various services related to tagging which were used by researchers - I remember “del.icio.us” and I think there were others
@egonw OpenPHACTS raises another case which is interesting.
Where the organisation/project stops or finishes but elements of the products continue, sometimes quite successfully. I don't know about this case specifically but it looks like the website has gone but there were contributions to the github repository up to 2022
The resignation of the editorial board of an Elsevier-owned linguistics journal and its open access reorganization could get the ball rolling for other journals to follow suit. Benedikt Fecher and Gert Wagner argue this case is a reminder that open access means more than just providing access to an article; it means rethinking the whole process of publishing. Open access also raises important questions
@cameronneylon In 2015, #OCLC disabled logins into purl.org for everyone: https://groups.google.com/g/persistenturls/c/Zpd4BHQxxIM/m/7MBio5FsAgAJ
Also in 2015, OCLC shut down dewey.info, the Linked Data version of the Dewey Decimal Classification.
@cameronneylon Also, the science Video sharing website SciVee "abruptly disappeared around the end of 2015": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciVee
AFAIK, there never was a warning or a public explanation of why the service shut down and all the videos' DOIs habe been dead from then on.
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