JISC is funding an ejournal preservation initiative. From today's press release:
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), in partnership with CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles), today issued a call to librarians and publishers to meet these [preservation] challenges together. An extended pilot will see the LOCKSS system, devised at Stanford University, deployed in selected libraries in the UK from January 2006. LOCKSS - ‘Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe’ - is a low-cost system that preserves access to a library’s online journals in a local ‘LOCKSS box’ in a manner acceptable to publishers. The chosen libraries will each keep copies of the journals they subscribe to and together they will ensure continued access to subscribed online journals even if a publisher should disappear, a journal cease publication, or the library end its subscription....Lorraine Estelle, Collections Team Manager at JISC, said: “One of the great barriers to the uptake of online resources in general, and journals in particular, is the perception that they lack permanence. Without assured future access to paid-for content institutions are reluctant to move to electronic-only subscriptions. LOCKSS removes the difficulty at a stroke and provides a very practical way of guaranteeing access to what are vital resources for academic institutions.”...A town meeting will be held in London on the 2nd December to which all interested libraries and publishers are invited. Further details, including the call for participation, are available [here].
(PS: LOCKSS works as well with OA journals as it does with non-OA journals. But I can't tell whether this initiative will include any OA journals.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/01/2005 10:50:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
