[Eril-l] The LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries and The CLOCKSS Archive Support “Long-tail” Publishers

[Victoria Reich]

The LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries and The CLOCKSS 
Archive Support “Long-tail” Publishers

Communities using the LOCKSS Software have collaboratively passed an 
important milestone and are now preserving over 1000 “long tail” journal 
publishers, smaller publishers who have ten or fewer journals. Content 
from these publishers are most at-risk for loss, making preservation 
vital to guarantee future access to the material for research and teaching.

"Stanford University Libraries provides access to approximately 83,560 
serials titles, most of these from long tail publishers," said Michael 
Keller, university librarian at Stanford. "The important work of 
Stanford professors, students and researchers depends on preserving the 
long tail at a scale of thousands of titles."

As libraries migrate from print to online-only publications, assurances 
from publishers that a library’s investments are protected and preserved 
for generations to come is essential.

"The LOCKSS Program provides designated communities with tools and 
support to preserve those long tail publishers of importance to them,” 
said Victoria Reich, LOCKSS Program executive director. “It is critical 
that each community, with unique language and subject specializations, 
takes responsibility for preserving content important for their work."

According to Reich there are tens of thousands of long tail publishers 
worldwide, which makes preserving the first 1,000 publishers an 
important first step to a larger endeavor to protect vulnerable digital 
content.

The CLOCKSS Archive is a critical and unique player in the quest to 
preserve Web-based scholarly publications. CLOCKSS assigns abandoned and 
orphaned (triggered) content a Creative Commons license to ensure it 
remains available forever. "Approximately 70% of the publishers 
preserved in the CLOCKSS Archive are long tail,” said Craig Van Dyck, 
CLOCKSS executive director. “The demand for preservation among these 
smaller publishers is increasing rapidly. The CLOCKSS Archive is pleased 
to work with publishers and librarians to achieve the necessary scale."

About Stanford University Libraries, www.stanford.edu
The Stanford University Libraries is more than a cluster of libraries; 
it connects people with information by providing diverse resources and 
services to the academic community. The Libraries includes more than 20 
individual libraries across campus, each with a world-class collection 
of books, journals, films, maps, databases, and more. The Stanford 
Digital Library is one of the most advanced digital libraries in the 
world with extensive digitization programs for books, manuscripts, maps, 
3d objects, images, audio, video and historical software and data files. 
Library experts in search, digital curation, digital humanities, 
computational social science, and digital preservation work 
hand-in-glove with students, faculty and research centers to build next 
generation applications and research corpora.

About the LOCKSS Program, www.lockss.org
The LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries, built on the 
principle that “lots of copies keep stuff safe", provides open source 
tools and support to communities who use LOCKSS to ensure preservation 
and continual access to both purchased and locally produced scholarly 
content.

About the CLOCKSS Archive, www.clockss.org
CLOCKSS, Controlled LOCKSS, is a not-for-profit joint venture between 
the leading academic publishers and research libraries whose mission is 
to build a geographically distributed dark archive to ensure the 
long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications.


Contact: LOCKSS Program, Stanford University, info at lockss.org