Conference addresses archiving and preservation of e-journals
The uncertainty surrounding long-term access to scholarly journals is a major issue for libraries, publishers and other cultural organisations. Not only does it bring into question continuing access to a vital scholarly resource but it is also seen as a major barrier preventing libraries from moving to electronic-only subscriptions.
A major event, held yesterday (March 27th) at the British Library, attracted an international audience drawn to discuss the issue of e-journal archiving and preservation, to look at key initiatives in the field and to explore ways forward.
Hazel Woodward, a member of the Jisc e-journals working group, introduced the day by saying that while a great deal of progress had been made in the last few years, major challenges remain in developing long-term e-journal archiving solutions, challenges which both academic libraries and national organisations such as Jisc, the Digital Preservation Coalition and the British Library are closely involved. 'while a great deal of progress had been made in the last few years, major challenges remain in developing long-term e-journal archiving solutions'
'Become involved'
She introduced Anne Kenney from CornellUniversity who gave the morning’s keynote presentation, giving an overview of the e-journal preservation landscape. A great deal of important content remained at risk, Ms Kenney said, and legislation is needed to meet the challenges of preserving a vital scholarly resource.
Encouraging librarians to become involved in archiving programmes, she suggested that they should also press those programmes to meet their needs. Sharing information with the growing community of librarians who are involved in developing local and community-based solutions to the preservation of e-journals was also, she suggested, an important way of spreading good practice and increasing the profile of preservation initiatives and the issue of preservation in general. Publishers too should enter into relationships with e-journal archiving programmes, she said, and bring their expertise and perspective to bear on this question.
Victoria Reich, Director of the LOCKSS programme, which began at Stanford University and which, through Jisc-CURL funding, has been extended to the UK, asked the question: ‘Our future: does it matter?’ Who is the custodian of the content, she asked. The answer is, she suggested, those libraries which are using the LOCKSS software to build local archives. ‘The mesh of the whole is stronger than any single silo,’ she said, using the CLOCKSS programme, run by a board made up of libraries and publishers, as an important example of such an approach.
Eileen Fenton spoke about the Portico initiative which also aims to preserve scholarly literature in electronic form for long-term availability. It sprang from a project set up in 2002 by JSTOR called the Electronic Archiving Initiative which looked to secure the community’s transition to secure reliance on electronic scholarly resources. Launched in 2005, Portico is concerned with preserving the intellectual content of peer-reviewed journals rather than the value-added aspects of published journal articles, such as the journal’s “look and feel” and links to further content. Starting with the publisher’s ‘source files’, it then converts these using specialised software into an archivable format. Source and archival files are deposited in the archive, and once deposited content remains in the archive. To date more than 495,000 articles from 8 publishers have been archived.
Portico’s approach to access can be characterised as an ‘archive of last resort’ based on trigger event conditions, when journals become no longer available from another source - when, for example, a publisher ceases publication, removes a title, or when back issues are removed from a publishers’ offering.
Designated persons from each library supporting the Portico archive has a password allowing them to browse in the archive. This enables archive auditing and verification. Libraries may rely on the archive for post-cancellation access if a publisher chooses to name Portico as a designated mechanism to meet this obligation.
To date more than 5,800 journals from over 30 publishers have been promised to the Portico archive. Contributing publishers supply content and make an annual financial contribution. Libraries also make a supporting contribution and more than 350 libraries have done so far, as around a quarter of early library participants are from international institutions.
The perspective of the national libraries
Erik Oltmans, Head of Acquisitions and Cataloguing at the National Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) of the Netherlands, spoke about how preservation and archiving activities have become embedded in the library’s practices and procedures. An example of this is the ‘e-Depot’, he said, which since 1995 has been hosting e-journal archives following agreement between the national library, Elsevier and the Dutch Publishers’ Association. Subsequent agreements and experiments have seen such activities become further established such that some 11 million publications, taking up 11 Terabytes of storage space, are now being held by the e-Depot with a further 50,000 objects being ingested every day.
Among the questions asked of Mr Oltmans was the question of whether, if a publisher was unable to meet its responsibilities under the agreement following a specified trigger event, the national library was then committed to making the content of the journal or journals openly available to all. Mr Oltmans replied that this was indeed the case. If a publisher stopped making a journal available, then the agreement stipulated that the journal would be made openly available to all through the e-Depot. It was, he said, ‘a safe place for the scientific community’ but one that did not compete with publisher-provided access.
Richard Boulderstone of the British Library spoke about how the Internet is transforming each stage of traditional scholarly communications processes. This presents a variety of challenges such as the distribution of content, versioning problems and the searching of the vast amounts of information now available to users. He spoke about some of the BL’s initiatives, such as the Digital Preservation Watch and the voluntary scheme (part of the UK Legal Deposit) which is prioritising the area of e-journals. Old business models are breaking down, he claimed, while long-term archives require highly resilient architectures, long-term funding and a commitment to quality. New business models are emerging and this is bringing a range of opportunities. Partnerships, he concluded, are the key to success. 'Old business models are breaking down, while long-term archives require highly resilient architectures, long-term funding and a commitment to quality'
Publishers and researchers
Steven Hall of Wiley-Blackwell gave the publisher’s perspective, saying that forecasts suggested that 50% of all serials publications would be online-only by 2016, while Blackwell’s forecast suggested that in the sciences 39% of journals would be online-only by the end of this year. New journals from Blackwell, he said, are now being produced online-only.
This situation means that there are considerable challenges to ensuring long-term access. Publishers are taking the challenges of archiving seriously, said Mr Hall. Wiley regularly undertakes both full and incremental back-ups, but, he reported, they do not yet participate in LOCKSS because of concerns about the possibility of having their archive held on multiple servers. There are also questions of governance, he suggested. But both Wiley and Blackwell are involved in CLOCKSS because it represents, he said, a more controlled environment.
Preservation is not the same as access, however, and neither is the same as open access, he said. Publishers will support a library’s legitimate perpetual access rights, but it is important not to conflate these with the very different questions of access and of open access. But there is no guarantee that the best possible system to emerge will be a not-for-profit solution; it is entirely conceivable, he said, that the commercial sector could come up with solutions which represent greatest value for money, a key consideration for the development of long-term solutions which could command buy-in from both academic librarians and publishers.
Paul Ayris, Director of library services at UCL, offered the research library’s perspective on the question of e-journal preservation. At UCL, he said, digital preservation is addressed through its Information Strategy, and led by the library, through a Working Group which develops procedures and practices for digital curation. The group has identified key questions concerning digital preservation and lifecycle questions. What is the best way to win institutional support for recommendations? What resources will be needed? How do we prioritise? And how much should be done in-house and how much outsourced?
As far as e-journals are concerned, UCL is moving towards the e-only delivery of journals, the aim being to keep researchers in STM out of the library and to deliver materials remotely and 24/7. A pilot project has seen the cancellation of a large number of print copies, noting those requests for print copies which are not able to be fulfilled. No such requests, he reported, have so far been made.
UCL has also been involved in the LIFE project, a joint British Library/UCL project funded by Jisc to develop a generic preservation model for costing digital curation at an item level. Further funding by Jisc is enabling the project to explore further the economic modelling and to develop more case studies to test the models. The results will establish benchmarks for local digital curation services in a university or national library.
With libraries increasingly moving to the e-only delivery of journal literature, digital curation needs to be embedded in institutional strategies, said Dr Ayris. This depends, however, on robust digital curation arrangements to underpin service delivery.
Questions which arose in discussion sessions throughout the day included questions on copyright, legal deposit, orphaned works, the preservation of multimedia resources, links to supplementary data (including the preservation of the links to remotely-held datasets), the development of international standards, the involvement of international standards bodies and the costs of any long-term solution.
The way forward
Hazel Woodward brought the conference to a close, thanking both the speakers and the delegates for what had been both an interesting and important day during which many key issues had been addressed. Summing up the day, she pointed to a number of practical considerations which she said the community was close to agreeing upon and which she said provided the basis for further progress in this area. Questions of terminology were, she suggested, at the heart of these considerations, as was an understanding of users’ and libraries’ needs in the digital age.
Distinction needed to be made between ‘perpetual access’, ‘archiving” and “long-term preservation”, she said, the requirements for each being related but importantly different. Ms Woodward pointed to the recently released Jisc briefing paper on e-journals archiving and preservation which offers clear definitions of these terms and explains the differences. Responsibility and requirements varies for each of these areas and the terminology used must be clear and agreed, she suggested.
Ms Woodward also called for the collaborative partnerships which had done so much to advance thinking in the area of e-journal preservation to be developed still further and she pointed to important synergies with the work of Jisc’s Information Environment. International standards organisations were other bodies which should be closely involved in establishing a way forward.
For further information and to view the Powerpoint presentation given during the day, please go to: Digital Preservation Coalition