OA publishing is an online activity that emphasizes on global dissemination of scholarly publications. Gold, hybrid and other kinds of OA publishing channels often create OA contents that are made available through portals of respective publishers. In an online environment, there is always an associated risk of pre-mature closure of a portal, a gateway, an OA publisher or an electronic journal. What we are seeing today in an online environment may not be available tomorrow. Many of the online portals, gateways, e-journals, online repositories or online databases will be unavailable or will be transformed into new entities in tomorrow’s online environment. The internet technologies are changing at much faster pace than human civilizations. As more and more contents are created online, there is growing concern that this digital content may not always be available. We can closely observe what happened when many of the Web 1.0 services got transformed into Web 2.0 or later version. Thus, we need to have a very effective long-term preservation plan for easy retrieval of the present born digital contents by the future generations.
Presently, two major long-term preservation programmes are available to academic libraries, researcher institutions and scholarly publishers, namely LOCKSS11 and CLOCKSS. The LOCKSS Programme, initiated in 1999 at the Stanford University Libraries, is an open-source, library-led digital preservation system built on the principle of “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”. LOCKSS follows a few unique principles that are vital to successful long-term preservation. Those principles are:
Decentralized and distributed preservation (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)
Give libraries local custody and control of their assets
Preserve the publisher’s original authoritative version
Perpetual access – guaranteed and seamless
Affordable and Sustainable.
In LOCKSS Program, libraries are building and preserving collections of OA titles and subscribed e-journals and e-books, using the LOCKSS software.
The collaborative collections become part of the Global LOCKSS Network. Libraries can also participate in Private LOCKSS Networks to preserve manuscripts and image collections, data sets, and government document collections.
The CLOCKSS12 (Controlled LOCKSS) initiative, launched in 2005 as a nonprofit venture, is a partnership of libraries and publishers committed to ensuring long-term access to scholarly work in digital format. It maintains the CLOCKSS Archive for long-term preservation of scholarly contents archived by its members. CLOCKSS has provision of permanent preservation of abandoned and orphaned contents with a Creative Commons license to ensure these contents remain available forever. CLOCKSS runs on LOCKSS technology. While LOCKSS is an open network, CLOCKSS is a closed system. These two systems are also experimenting with open file formats, which are device independent or software independent for future retrieval of archived contents.
Many OA publishers, e-journal publishers as well as research libraries are actively participating in both the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS programmes. However, some of the OA publishers and research libraries are left out, particularly which are operating outside the North America and Europe. We need to develop a culture of long-term preservation for making our scholarly works permanently available to the future generations, even when the publisher has ceased to exist.
References and Further Reading
CLOCKSS (n.d). How CLOCKSS Works. Available at https://www.clockss.org/clockss/How_CLOCKSS_Works
M. Factor, et al (2007). “The Need for Preservation-aware Storage – A Position Paper”. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. Special Issue on File and Storage Systems, 41: 1, pp 19-23
M. Factor, et al (2007). Preservation DataStores: Architecture for Preservation-aware Storage. MSST: 3- 15.
Stanford University (n.d). What Is LOCKSS? Available at https://www.lockss.org/about/what-is-lockss/