[Eril-l] CLOCKSS is Collaborating to Improve the Preservation of Open Access Journals

[Kim Smilay]

5 November is World Preservation Day. This announcement was posted today on
the DOAJ news site
<https://blog.doaj.org/2020/11/05/doaj-to-lead-a-collaboration-to-improve-th
e-preservation-of-open-access-journals/> :

DOAJ to Lead a Collaboration to Improve the Preservation of OA Journals

DOAJ <https://doaj.org/> , CLOCKSS Archive <https://clockss.org/> , Internet
Archive <https://archive.org/> , Keepers Registry
<https://keepers.issn.org/> /ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge
Project (PKP) <https://pkp.sfu.ca/>  have agreed to partner to provide an
alternative pathway for the preservation of small-scale, APC-free, Open
Access journals.

The recent study <https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11933>  authored by M.Laakso,
L.Matthias, and N.Jahn has revived academia’s concern over the disappearance
of the scholarly record disseminated in Open Access (OA) journals.

Their research focuses on OA journals as at risk of vanishing, and
“especially small-scale and APC-free journals [
] with limited financial
resources” that often “opt for lightweight technical solutions” and “cannot
afford to enroll in preservation schemes.” The authors have used data
available in the Directory of Open Access Journals to come up with the
conclusion that just under half of the journals indexed in DOAJ participate
in preservation schemes. Their findings “suggest that current approaches to
digital preservation are successful in archiving content from larger
journals and established publishing houses but leave behind those that are
more at risk.” They call for new preservation initiatives “to develop
alternative pathways [
] better suited for smaller journals that operate
without the support of large, professional publishers.”

Answering that call, the joint initiative proposed by the five organisations
aims at offering an affordable archiving option to OA journals with no
author fees (“diamond” OA) registered with DOAJ, as well as raising
awareness among the editors and publishers of these journals about the
importance of enrolling with a preservation solution. DOAJ will act as a
single interface with CLOCKSS, PKP and Internet Archive and facilitate a
connection to these services for interested journals. Lars Bjørnhauge, DOAJ
Managing Editor, said: “That this group of organisations are coming together
to find a solution to the problem of “vanishing” journals is exciting. It
comes as no surprise that journals with little to no funding are prone to
disappearing. I am confident that we can make a real difference here.”

Reports regarding the effective preservation of the journals’ content will
be aggregated by the ISSN International Centre (ISSN IC) and published in
the Keepers Registry. Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN IC Director, commented: “As the
operator of the Keepers Registry service, the ISSN International Centre
receives inquiries from journal publishers looking for archiving solutions.
This project is a new step in the development of our service to meet this
need in a transparent and diverse way involving all our partners.”

About 50% of the journals identified by DOAJ as having no archiving solution
in place use the Open Journal System (OJS). Therefore, the initiative will
also identify and encourage journals on PKP’s OJS platform to preserve their
content in the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN), or to use another
supported solution if the OJS instance isn’t new enough to be compatible
with the PN integration (OJS 3.1.2+).

The partners will then follow up by assessing the success and viability of
the initiative with an aim to open it up to new archiving agencies and other
groups of journals indexed in DOAJ to consolidate preservation actions and
ensure service diversity.

DOAJ will act as the central hub where publishers will indicate that they
want to participate. Archiving services, provided by CLOCKSS, Internet
Archive and PKP will expand their existing capacities. These agencies will
report their metadata to the Keepers Registry to provide an overview of the
archiving efforts. Project partners are currently exploring business and
financial sustainability models and outlining areas for technical
collaboration.

  _____  

CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit joint venture among the world’s leading academic
publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable,
international, and geographically distributed dark archive with which to
ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the
benefit of the greater global research community. https://clockss.org/.

DOAJ is a community-curated list of peer-reviewed, open access journals and
aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer
reviewed open access material. DOAJ’s mission is to increase the visibility,
accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open
access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline,
geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal
owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and
standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to
being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as
free to use or reuse for everyone.

Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library, top 200 website at
https://archive.org/, and archive of over 60PB of millions of free books,
movies, software, music, websites, and more. The Internet Archive partners
with over 800 libraries, universities, governments, non-profits, scholarly
communications, and open knowledge organizations around the world to advance
the shared goal of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Since 2017, Internet
Archive has pursued partnerships and technical work with a focus on
preserving all publicly accessible research outputs, especially at-risk,
open access journal literature and data, and providing mission-aligned,
non-commercial open infrastructure for the preservation of scholarly
knowledge.

Keepers Registry hosted by the ISSN International Centre, an
intergovernmental organisation under the auspices of UNESCO, is a global
service that monitors the archiving arrangements for continuing resources
including e-serials. A dozen archiving agencies all around the world
currently report to Keepers Registry.
The Registry has three main purposes:
1/ to enable librarians, publishers and policy makers to find out who is
looking after what e-content, how, and with what terms of access;
2/ to highlight e-journals which are still “at risk of loss” and need to be
archived;
3/ to showcase the archiving organizations around the world, i.e. the
Keepers, which provide the digital shelves for access to content over the
long term.

PKP is a multi-university and long-standing research project that develops
(free) open source software to improve the quality and reach of scholarly
publishing. For more than twenty years, PKP has played an important role in
championing open access. Open Journal Systems (OJS) was released in 2002 to
help reduce cost as a barrier to creating and consuming scholarship online.
Today, it is the world’s most widely used open source platform for journal
publishing: approximately 42% of the journals in the DOAJ identify OJS as
their platform/host/aggregator. In 2014, PKP launched its own Private LOCKSS
Network (now the PKP PN) to offer OJS journals unable to invest in digital
preservation a free, open, and trustworthy service.

For more information, contact:
CLOCKSS: Craig Van Dyck, cvandyck at clockss.org <mailto:cvandyck at clockss.org> 
DOAJ: Dom Mitchell, dom at doaj.org <mailto:dom at doaj.org> 
Internet Archive: Jefferson Bailey, jefferson at archive.org
<mailto:jefferson at archive.org> 
Keepers Registry: Gaëlle Béquet, gaelle.bequet at issn.org
<mailto:gaelle.bequet at issn.org> 
PKP: James MacGregor, jbm9 at sfu.ca <mailto:jbm9 at sfu.ca> 

 

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