Open Access News

The shift from print to electronic publication of scholarly journals is occurring at a particularly rapid pace....In the face of this shift, what makes preservation action so urgent for electronic scholarly journals -- and the risk of failure so high for the academy -- is the nature of the licensing regime under which these journals are now distributed. When research and academic libraries license electronic journals, they do not to take local possession of a copy as they did with print. Rather, they use content stored on remote systems controlled by publishers, and economies of scale in electronic publishing are driving control of more and more journals into fewer and fewer hands....For electronic journals, the academy has as yet no functional equivalent in long-term maintenance and control over the scholarly record that "owning a copy" provided for printed journals. Unless and until it creates digital archiving services, the academy cannot fully shift to electronic-only journal publishing, and cannot fully achieve the system-wide savings and benefits associated with such a shift....Four key actions are essential. First, research and academic libraries and associated academic institutions must recognize that preservation of electronic journals is a kind of insurance, and is not in and of itself a form of access. Preservation is a way of managing risk, first, against the permanent loss of electronic journals and, second, against having journal access disrupted for a protracted period following a publisher failure. Storing electronic journal files in trusted archives outside the control of the publisher addresses the first risk. Mitigating the second risk requires investment in substitute access systems, which may cost more or less to construct depending on the quality and duration of disruption that the academic community would be willing to tolerate in the event of a failure. Second, in order to address these risk factors and provide insurance against loss, qualified preservation archives would provide a minimal set of well-defined services. [Waters then lists six such services.] ...Third, libraries must invest in a qualified archiving solution....Finally, research and academic libraries and associated academic institutions must effectively demand archival deposit by publishers as a condition of licensing electronic journals.

Comment. I'm not the only OA activist who has tried to distinguish preservation from access so that the steps needed for preservation don't delay the steps needed for OA. But let's also admit that we can pursue OA and preservation in parallel so that neither effort delays the other. I've called preservation a separate essential --not part of OA but necessary-- and I stand by that. Preservation is essential not only for subscription ejournals but also for OA ejournals and repositories. I support the call by the Waters group. I particularly appreciate its diagnosis that the problem lies in licensing restrictions. Libraries rarely have permission to make copies for long-term local storage or to migrate these copies to new media and formats to keep them readable as technology changes. It's important for libraries to realize that OA removes these permission barriers and makes OA content easier to preserve than non-OA content. But it's just as important for OA activists to realize that this only makes preservation efforts permissible. It doesn't by itself get the job done. We still have work to do.

Update. The document has moved to a new URL (already incorporated above). Note to CLIR: please put a redirect page at the original URL.