A coalition of journal publishers and university libraries is starting an experimental archive of online journals that will be held in reserve in case a journal's publisher goes out of business or is otherwise unable to continue providing online access to its journals. The pilot program uses peer-to-peer archiving software developed at Stanford University, called Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, or LOCKSS. The journal archive is called Controlled Lockss, or Clockss. Participating university libraries are at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland; the University of Virginia; Indiana University at Bloomington; and Rice and Stanford Universities. The New York Public Library also is participating. The publishers that will provide journals for Clockss are the American Medical Association, the American Physiological Society, Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Sage Publications, Springer Publishing, and the Taylor & Francis Group. Elsevier is contributing funds but not journal articles. In Clockss, each university library will maintain two computer servers, each of which will contain complete copies of all electronic journals from the participating publishers. Having copies of the archive on so many different servers is meant to ensure that at least one copy will always be available even in the wake of a technical problem or disaster. The archives will remain "dark" -- hidden and unavailable for use -- so long as the journal publishers continue to provide access to their online material. The Clockss system will automatically detect whether a publisher has stopped providing online access. Once a journal's material has been unavailable online for at least six months, the archiving system's governing board, made up of representatives of the participating organizations, will discuss the case and determine whether the material should be considered "orphaned." If so, the governing board will authorize release of its electronic copy of the journal....During the experiment, the governing board will test its procedures with a fictitious scenario for considering whether a particular journal should be considered orphaned. That exercise will illuminate whether the libraries and publishers would use different standards for deciding that the archive should be opened up, she said.
Also see the CLOCKSS press release (January 23, 2005).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/25/2006 01:22:00 PM.
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.
