Open access and trouble in Iran

Please spare a thought for colleagues and friends in Iran. It is hard for us to imagine the suffering these generous and hospitable people are enduring at present, and I will not attempt to describe it.

I do not want to trivialise this suffering. I simply draw attention to one very small piece of collateral damage, which I am sure means nothing to the ayatollahs, but is perhaps part of a wider issue. And it is one which perhaps concerns diamond open access journals especially.

The issue is this: Open access is intended to make the results of our research available to everyone. But this can be interrupted, possibly long-term, by outside events.

I had to look through the Scimago journal rankings in discrete mathematics and in algebra and number theory this morning. (I don’t put much faith in these rankings, but the bureaucrats in some places do, and so I feel I owe to my coauthors to suggest journals which will benefit their careers.) Two very respectable journals, one in the top quartile and one in the second, are Communications in Combinatorics and Optimization and the International Journal of Group Theory. I have a recent paper in each of these journals. Both are currently inaccessible. Both are based in Iran.

The way the world looks at the moment, it may be that other countries descend into chaos or authoritarianism, and other journals become inaccessible for various periods.

What can we do? Of course I don’t mean the crucial question, what we can do for the Iranian people, to which the answer is probably not very much; but rather how do we save the fruits of people’s research?

There are procedures at present for saving web-based journals from oblivion, but they depend on having access to the material; if the computers hosting it are destroyed or disabled or all access blocked, how will this work? There should be mirror sites for all resources of this kind. I do not know whether they exist for these two journals.