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PloS, why it ain't so hot

By razib on October 4, 2008.

Read all about it, When Open Access Fails. Reminds me of what happened to Hotmail.

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That isn't a DNS registration problem if he could get there "clicking around the Plos One domain". And he should have known that if he is talking about web servers. It is likely a caching problem with his upstream provider and could happen to any location using DNS. Nothing PloS could do about it. Makes you think about the reliability of the Web eh?

PLoS having a glitch (yes, it's back up now) with their domain name hardly constitutes a failure of Open Access. Every site I've ever used on a regular basis--commercial or otherwise--has had downtime, this isn't anything special.

mark, well, it's back up. but i noticed the problem too, so it was affecting my access. so if it wasn't a DNS problem it sure wasn't a tiny local problem. from the whois:

Created On:02-Oct-2000 17:03:51 UTC
Last Updated On:04-Oct-2008 20:30:45 UTC

something went down.

john, yes, almost all websites have "downtime." but usually it is just that i can't access the website or something.

So, the domain was down for a couple of hours. The IT folks took care of it and fixed it. How's that a problem?

I don't see how this is a failure of open access particularly. We've had access to paid resources get switched off at my library because the publishers forgot to invoice us, then got shirty because we hadn't paid. That's a problem of a different kind, obviously, but my point is that forgetting to do something that keeps the lights on, figuratively speaking, isn't solely the province of non-profits.

> open-access-fails
a bit ot, but only so much: anthropology.net reloads endlessly when the site's cookies aren't accepted... not quite the exception-handling you'd expect.