Publishing in Perpetuity

The importance of Digital Preservation for

Publishers in Science, Medicine and Technology

Drs Eefke Smit

International STM Association

Director for Standards and Technology

STM is a trade organization: Qu’est que c’est ?

• Approx 100 scientific publishers– From small to large– Profit and non-profit– Learned societies and corporations– Primary, secondary, aggregators, agents

• In 26 different countries• Publishing > 60 % of all research articles• Majority of all research journals• Tens of 000’s of books and reference works• Major databases• 60 % members outside Europe

STM as trade organization; what does it do ?

• Intellectual property matters– Public policy on protection of rights– Communicate guidelines, codes of conduct– Fighting piracy, handling © disputes

• Standards and Technology– New protocols, fonts and formats – Developing standards, exchange of best practices

• Publishing Projects– 3rd world access: Hinari, Agora, Oare– PatientInform: access to new medical research

• Education and Training– Courses, conferences, seminars

To Publish in order not to Perish

• Possibly the deepest wish of every author

• Digitisation poses new challenge• 90 % of journals online• Subscriptions shifting to e-only• E-content growing fast

• Publishers invest heavily• Own e-archives• Own back-volumes• Joint initiatives• Identifiers and cross-linking

• Publishers support the creation of rights-protected archives that preserve scholarship in perpetuity

Publishers participate in many digital preservation initiatives

• Collaboration with all stakeholders• Layered approach in e-preservation:

– Own e-archive– Keep content convertable for migration– Ensure integrity of content during migration– Deposit into independent, rights-protected

archives– Ensure interim services in case of collapse

• International scope• Not all eggs in one basket

Portico and CLOCKSS: central versus network• Portico: Permanent archive for electronic scholarly journals

– Library initiative– Archiving based on content migration, held centrally– Relies on existing standards– Sound business model– Non profit institution– Scores high on sustainability, but is limited in scope (ejournals)

• CLOCKSS: Controlled Lots of Copies to Keep Stuff Safe.– Community governed (6 libr, 11 publ)– Distributed archive network: 7 libraries (max 15)– Each library has 2 CLOCKSS boxes, publishers deposit – Archiving based on software to monitor and correct content – Voting between cached documents for continued integrity– For any scholarly material

Agreed terms of engagement

• JOINT initiatives: co-governed by publishers and libraries• Trigger Events defined (as jointly decided):

– A publisher stops operations; or – A publisher ceases to publish a title; or – A publisher no longer offers back issues; or – Upon catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher's delivery

platform.

Important:• Copyright protection• Archiving of official publications, subscribed or not• Independent of Business Models• Interoperability is important

Key principles from the stm perspective:1. STM publishers see long term digital preservation as a key

responsibility

2. Most publishers have taken responsible preservation action for their publications on this point individually as well as jointly, eg in Portico, CLOCKSS, and via National Libraries.

3. Open, publisher-friendly standards for digital preservation should ensure to keep archival information retrievable and accessible in perpetuity

4. Standards should be commonly applicable between official publications and grey literature and research data in repositories to ensure interoperability

5. Too many different standards and requirements for digital preservation should be avoided as they make proper maintenance of archives very difficult, while adoption of 2 or 3 parallel practices will increase the chance of long term survival