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CONTENTS Contents News Analysis


Rights • research • e-books Unpacking e-books


Insight into scholarly e-books today and in the future


Physics needs collective conversations


A new report reveals how collaboration is needed in delivering information to physicists


Data centres and research


How data centres can help research Delving into experimental details


An Irish startup is unlocking product information from literature


Products Diary Interview


Vicky Reich of LOCKSS and Randy Kiefer of CLOCKSS


31 32 34 Digital preservation matters


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CORPORATE TEAM Chairman & Publisher: Tom Wilkie Research Information is published by Europa Science Ltd, The Spectrum Building, The Michael Young Centre, Purbeck Road, Cambridge, CB2 8PD, UK ISSN 1744-8026 Tel: +44 (0)1223 211170 Fax: +44 (0)1223 211107 Web: www.researchinformation.info


34 26 28 Delving into experimental details 28 24 5 8 16 ON THE COVER Unpacking books generates new e-content 16 Leader: Siân Harris Pressing for preservation


Over the years I have written plenty of articles that can no longer be accessed digitally, either because the magazine or website is no longer published or because files were lost during platform migrations or change of ownership. Who cares, you might say, about 800 words that I wrote a decade ago – except perhaps the people I interviewed. But it highlights a wider issue. In many cases, access to these articles did not stop because of a managed approach to digital disposable but simply because, as Randy Kiefer of CLOCKSS notes on page 34, digital is such a fragile format. And it leaves me wondering how much more content is lost because of lack of a preservation strategy.


This is a pressing challenge for scholarly publishing. Visit any national library and you can see print books dating back centuries. But electronic books (page 16) are now firmly embedded in our methods of communication and they are evolving from being static text to being multimedia, interactive content. Let’s hope that these resources can be equally available to researchers in centuries to come.


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