Preservation FEATURE


isn’t easy for the libraries and publishers of developing nations. Issues over stable publishing systems and infrastructure hamper uptake, and of course resources including cash, or a lack of it, can cripple preservation plans. Susan Murray, managing director of African Journals Online – a not-for-profit online service holding collections of peer-reviewed, African- published scholarly journals – describes a publishing set-up very different from what many communities will be used to.


‘Many African journals are published individually by a few dedicated volunteers working in severely resource-constrained areas and institutions,’ she says. ‘Challenges can be as straightforward as intermittent electricity provision, under-developed domestic banking infrastructure, unreliable telephone connectivity and lack of access to the internet and computers.’ Constraints can also be related to insufficient manuscript submissions, an author’s proficiency in a journal’s language and African universities incentivising researchers to publish in more


Preservation organisations are also seeing a rising demand for services from established as well as up and coming open-access publishers


prestigious overseas titles. AJOL itself offers free online hosting for qualifying journals, and despite myriad challenges, papers published in African journals are regularly noted and cited. ‘In 2012 there were more than 13 million downloads of papers hosted on AJOL with over one million repeat users of the website from around the world,’ says Murray. ‘More than 40 per cent of repeat users of the AJOL website are from Africa and a growing proportion of users come from other developing countries around the world.’


Importantly, Murray is adamant that publishers and libraries in developing nations are very serious about preservation but participation depends on resources, journal context as well as the ICT skills and proficiency of the editorial board and office. Indeed, at least in Africa, many less well-resourced journals rely on AJOL to preserve, and continue to host, content if a journal ceases publication. ‘We regularly update and securely preserve several copies and dated versions of the full database and partner journals’ content at our


www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo


offices, offsite in two South African cities and also offshore,’ she says. ‘In fact, we’ve had to send a couple of publishers a complete [journal] back file where, for example, servers have crashed.’ ‘But ironically,’ she adds, ‘organisations in resource-constrained settings have to stretch their means to continue hard-copy provision and preservation, given the digital divide, as well as find ways to assure digital preservation.’


The success of open access Developing nations aside, preservation organisations are also seeing a rising demand for services from established as well as up and coming open-access (OA) publishers. One clear example is PeerJ, which was launched in June 2012 by former PLOS ONE publisher, Peter Binfield, and former Mendeley chief scientist, Jason Hoyt. Operating on an innovative business model – ‘pay once, publish for life’ – the publisher charges a single, low fee that allows researchers to then publish biological and medical sciences articles for free. The business model is brave but appears to be working, and as Binfield asserts, PeerJ, like other professsional OA publishers, takes preservation very seriously.


‘The serious open-access publishers that are emerging are professional, well-run operations,’ he says. ‘For example, there’s PLOS, Biomed Central, Hindawi, ourselves and we all have good industry standard preservation strategies.’ PeerJ, for one, deposits its pre-print server and journal content in both CLOCKSS and LOCKSS repositories with article text also archived in the open-access repository PubMed Central. ‘We’d also like to be in The Royal Dutch Library when they start adding content again,’ Binfield adds. But why CLOCKSS and LOCKSS? Binfield points to cost, but CLOCKSS’s Kiefer firmly


PeerJ’s ‘pay once, publish for life’ business model includes preservation of pre-prints and content


believes his organisation has an edge over alternative preservation services for OA publishers. As he explains, if his organisation triggers content, then that released content is also OA and has the same availability as when it was first published. ‘We might use a slightly different Creative Commons licence but the fact of the matter is, if we are triggering content, then the publisher has gone and what we’re saying is this cannot be used in a commercial venture,’ he adds. Formal preservation aside, PeerJ’s Binfield also highlights an archiving concept that he believes is unique to OA journals and is largely ignored by publishing communities. ‘Our content is now sitting on the hard drives and thumb drives of millions of people around the world,’ he says. ‘This distributed back-up may not be a formal archive but we encourage this in our licence whereas a subscription publisher actively tries to prevent that kind of thing.’


But can a distributed informal back-up provide a safe alternative to formal preservation? Judging


Preserving government information


Last September, librarians from 11 Canadian university institutions joined forces to preserve Canadian electronic government information under threat from archive budget cuts. Forming the Canadian Government Information Private LOCKSS Network – CGI-PLN – the group has established a geographically distributed infrastructure to securely preserve government information and help ensure access to digital content in the future.


For example, the staff for digitisation at Libraries and Archives Canada was recently reduced by some 50 per cent. The likely


end result is that new publications will be published online, but older information in hard copy is less likely to become available. With this in mind, the CGI-PLN’s focus is to protect information that has been publicly disseminated by the Government of Canada. As James Jacobs, LOCKSS- USDOCS coordinator, Stanford University highlights: ‘It’s heartening to see Canadian libraries collaborating on such a critical mission. Future Canadians will laud the forward-thinking work of these librarians. Lots of copies do indeed keep Canadian documents safe.’


FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014 Research Information 17


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