Interview
‘The scholarly record is at risk without long-term preservation’
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research libraries and academic publishers. We have since evolved to become an independent charity jointly governed by libraries and publishers united to protect scholarly content. To date, we’ve been entrusted to
preserve nearly 50 million journal articles and more than 350,000 books. We are making a concerted effort to welcome more book publishers into our community and are keen to work with publishers of all shapes and sizes. Scholarly content is archived in a
network of carefully controlled servers distributed around the world at leading academic institutions, and the nodes in this network are in constant contact to check and, if necessary, restore authenticity to the content protected within. When content entrusted to us permanently disappears from the web, we then make it accessible to everyone.
How has the world of preservation changed in recent years, and how do you see its future? The scholarly record is at risk without long-term preservation, and here I mean much more than a remote back-up copy. Long-term preservation requires active management to ensure the content remains healthy, and vigilance in the face of changing technology, disk failures, hacking, and worse. Sadly, failure to preserve at all (or until it is too late) is the key challenge. This challenge is greatest for less formally published scholarly communications, but it remains firmly in scope for formal published content and established publishers too. Last year, when I took up the role
of executive director, I rather naively imagined that most books and journals – at least academic ones – would now be safely preserved in digital archives. But this is sadly very far from being the case, and more is needed. According to the International ISSN Centre in 2021, there were 2.8 million ISSNs issued and nearly 300,000 were assigned to digital resources. Fewer than 69,000 of these titles are fully preserved, which means they are archived in at least three independent digital archives. No one even knows the equivalent figures for books. So, there is a very great deal to do to encourage
30 Research Information Spring 2022
and enable publishers to ensure content reaches archives. Let me illustrate this point with
reference to the JASPER project (see
doaj.org/preservation). CLOCKSS is a partner in this project, along with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the ISSN International Centre’s KEEPERS registry, the Internet Archive, and the Public Knowledge Project private LOCKSS network (PKP-PN). The project was established in response to studies by Mikael Laakso and others showing that hundreds of open access journals have disappeared entirely from the web in the last 20 years, and that more than 7,000 titles registered with DOAJ have no preservation policy or archive in place. We’ve created a content pipeline from DOAJ to Internet Archive to CLOCKSS and are providing encouragement and support to enable publishers to archive these titles.
What’s the biggest issue facing scholarly communications at the moment, and how do you hope the industry will change over the next decade? Digital preservation is also becoming more challenging as artificial intelligence, dynamic databases, interactive resources, knowledge graphs and more become embedded in the scholarly ecosystem. How do you preserve an entire online ecosystem in which scholars collaborate,
discover and share new knowledge? In truth at present, we cannot preserve the entire online ecosystem of research. We can take snapshots and preserve meaningful points in a scholars’ journey through this ecosystem, and it is essential that we do so. Digital preservation as a profession is therefore becoming more complicated. It requires an understanding of the social, organisational and intellectual environments where metadata and content exist, as well as an understanding of the content and technology itself, and also an understanding of both the creators and users of research information. Acceleration of change in all these spheres is going to drive changes in the way we organise to do the job of digital preservation.
Finally, do you have any fascinating facts, hobbies or pastimes you’d like to admit to? Post-lockdown there is so much incentive to revive old hobbies and explore new ones too. My teenage son says I’m now doing ‘all the side quests’ – which, in this game called my life, include improv comedy, rally marshalling, singing and boxercise. I’m not convinced about the boxercise… I think I’ll stick to running.
Interview by Tim Gillett
@researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info
ImageFlow/
Shutterstock.com
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