UK LOCKSS pilot strand
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The UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme Extension Period will conclude on 31 July 2008. Institutions wishing to either continue or commence participation in the UK LOCKSS e-journal archiving service, will from 1 August 2008, be required to pay annual fees.
Prices for participation in the UK LOCKSS Programme from 1 August 2008 are available from:
http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/lockss
Background to the UK LOCKSS Pilot
The move in recent years towards provision of scholarly journals in electronic form has greatly enhanced the access to and availability of scholarly publications. However the arrangements for preserving long-term access to electronic journals are far from satisfactory. When subscribing to electronic journals, libraries no longer possess a local copy as they did with printed journals. They effectively lease the content of the electronic journals they subscribe to by remotely accessing it on publishers' servers over the computer network. The problem with this common practice is that access to entire back runs of electronic journals could be lost to academic libraries when subscriptions are cancelled or when journals cease publication. The uncertainty of continuing access is a major barrier preventing libraries from moving to electronic-only subscriptions. The recent endorsement of the statement 'Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals' by organisations such as the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) highlight the concern in the scholarly community over the long-term future of scholarly electronic journals. There is consensus that a solution to the e-journal archiving problem is urgently needed and that a technically and financially sustainable solution requires collaboration between libraries and publishers.
Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) is a tool developed at the Stanford University Libraries to to address the issues surrounding e-journal archiving and preservation. Over 80 libraries and 60 publishers world-wide now are work together through the LOCKSS Alliance to preserve persistent access to a wide range of content ranging from commercial subscription content to non-profit open-access e-journals.
The UK LOCKSS Pilot is funded in partnership with the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL) which directly engages twenty-four selected UK HE institutions in trailing the LOCKSS technology for e-journal archiving and preservation. The participating libraries will be supported by a LOCKSS Technical Support Service based at the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), through the provision of technical advice, software development and training. Negotiations to obtain publishers' permissions to allow LOCKSS-based archiving will be undertaken by Content Complete Ltd, JISC's negotiation agent for the NESLi2 national e-journals initiative.
Ensuring long-term preservation of and continuing access to scholarly and educational resources is an important strategic area for JISC. Archiving clauses have been included in the Model Licence for e-journal subscription agreements to provide the libraries with some reassurance of continued access to the content they have paid for. This pilot is a step towards a practical implementation to fulfill these clauses and will help to ensure that content once purchased remains accessible.
The LOCKSS Pilot aims first of all to raise awareness of the LOCKSS initiative. Moreover, by providing the participating libraries with the practical help to get started and to develop the skills needed to run their LOCKSS nodes beyond the Pilot, it is hoped that the Pilot will seed a self-sustaining base of LOCKSS users in the UK, who will collectively preserve a major proportion of the e-journals in common use in the JISC community. The Pilot should also help to build experience in the community and to form a centre of expertise outside the US, which in turn will benefit the international LOCKSS community.
Components of the LOCKSS pilot
LOCKSS technical support service (LTSS)
A central UK support service is a crucial enabling factor to encourage the take-up of LOCKSS and reduce the learning curve of the participating libraries. The LTSS will build on the current infrastructure of the Digital Curation Centre and include a LOCKSS Technical Support Officer. The responsibilities of the LTSS include:
- first-line technical support
- development of publisher specific plug-ins
- organisation of training and awareness raising events
- assistance to participating libraries in collection development
- purchase and installation of LOCKSS hardware
- representation of UK libraries at LOCKSS Alliance
Hardware with suitable configuration for LOCKSS nodes will be purchased collectively by the LOCKSS Technical Support Officer, who will set them up at the participating libraries' premises and liaise with local library and technical support staff to ensure that the machines work within the libraries' institutional network.
Publisher negotiation
The LOCKSS system uses a crawler to collect e-journal content from the publishers' websites as it is published. Both written and machine-readable permissions from the publishers are required for this. Publishers are encouraged to grant libraries legal permission to cache and archive their content by means of the wording in licences or terms and conditions. In addition, a web page on the publisher's website called the publisher manifest that is recognisable by the crawler contains a specific permission statement and permits the crawler to crawl, collect, and preserve the content. A publisher manifest is needed for each "archival unit" (typically a volume) to be preserved through the LOCKSS system. Once permission for an archival unit has been granted by a publisher, it can be collected by all institutions which have authorised access to it. Content Complete Ltd will work together with the publishers to obtain the required permissions for the pilot programme. The negotiation will in the first instance focus on NESLi 2005 and 2006 publishers who have not yet agreed to make content available for collection and preservation by LOCKSS. Negotiation with non-NESLi publishers will take place after they have been identified and agreed on by the participating libraries. A legal appraisal of the archiving clauses in the JISC Model NESLi2 licence will take place to ensure that these automatically and explicitly allow for future LOCKSS-based archiving. This work will be undertaken by the JISC Services group.
LOCKSS Alliance membership
The LOCKSS Alliance is a membership organisation for libraries interested in using LOCKSS to build and preserve e-journals collections. The LOCKSS Alliance was established in 2004 and currently has 50 academic library members in the United States. The LOCKSS Alliance provides a coordinated infrastructure for software development and collection management. It is necessary for the continued existence of LOCKSS that libraries around the world support it. A collective UK membership for the participating libraries in the LOCKSS pilot will be jointly funded by JISC and CURL to ensure UK priorities are factored into the US-led work and its future development. The participating libraries will enjoy the benefits of full members, including members-only premium content, plug-in applications for different publishing platforms and various training material and documentation. The UK's participation in the LOCKSS Alliance will not only distribute and share the efforts in working with publishers, building collections and software development, it will also allow access to the expertise of the LOCKSS team and transfer the knowledge and skills to the UK, helping to form a self-sustaining UK LOCKSS community and a centre of expertise outside the US.
Collection development
The Pilot aims to recruit a critical mass of libraries to build a community in the UK that will provide the natural safe havens for jointly purchased e-journal titles and those of common interest. The above funded components of the Pilot were designed to free the libraries from all other tasks so that they can concentrate on the ones they are best placed to carry out - building and managing local e-journal library collections. This means using the web-based administration tools to configure the institutional LOCKSS node and to collect licensed and freely available content that fits the institutions' collection development policy and guidelines. LOCKSS requires very little system administration effort to run and typically a librarian is expected to spend at most 3-5 days a year to add content to the local collection and to upgrade the LOCKSS node. The priority of the Pilot is to ensure all NESLi2 content is available via LOCKSS. However, the programme will also seek to include non-NESLi content important to the UK HE research community. Assisted by the JISC Scholarly Communications Group, the participating libraries will take part in a survey which will be carried out to identify and agree on titles/publishers of common interest, particularly those of interest to the UK that are at risk. Negotiations with the publishers of selected content will be carried out by Content Complete Ltd. Plug-ins needed for these publishers will subsequently be developed by the LTSS.
Participants
Institutions participating in the LOCKSS Pilot are:
Full Members
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University of Hertfordshire
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University of Glasgow
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University of Sheffield
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Oxford University
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Cambridge University Library
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University of Hull
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UCL Library Services
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University of Exeter
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University of York
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University of Liverpool
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University of Surrey
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Cardiff University
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University of Manchester
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University of Wolverhampton
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De Montfort University
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University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
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Loughborough University
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University of St Andrews
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University of Birmingham
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University of Durham
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University of East London
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Middlesex University
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University of Edinburgh
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Kings' College London
Associate Members
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