UKSG 2006 Archiving scholarly material Gordon Tibbitts President Blackwell Publishing, Inc. April 4, 2006

“Digital preservation represents one of the grand challenges facing higher education” SPW Andrew Mellon Foundation September 2005

Archiving Scholarly Material: One publisher’s perspective Here are some questions to ask: Who should be archiving digital scholarly material? What should be archived? Where are the solutions for digital scholarly archiving emerging and how do they work? What are critical factors that will make digital scholarly archives a success?

Who should be archiving digital scholarly material? Librarians and Archivists

What should be archived? We could store all information everywhere in every plank instant so as not to lose any relevant information! A more practical approach would be to store appropriate scholarly content. Here are three broad categories of scholarly content we might call appropriate: – Type 1: Scholarly journals and books – Type 2: Research material supporting these works (ex. pre and post-prints, reviews, lecture material, and data And an emerging type: – Type 3: Content built from the discourse surrounding scholarly works: ex. BLOGS, LMS, Lecture notes, social networks, conferences, podcasts, message boards, and, webX seminars

Where are the digital scholarly archives emerging and how do they work? Most archives must ingest content or point to it? – Moving things into an archive makes conversion, testing, format migration etc. work much more achievable. Some material simply will not be able to be moved (ex. Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and bio-science databases) Archives should be focused on how to preserve the content and access to archives is for restoration purposes There are four general classes of archives: – National – Product Solutions – Run-Your-Own and – Community Based

National archives National archives include the National Library of the Netherlands, Legal deposit in the British Library, KOPAL (German Federal Ministry). Generally: – These efforts ingest material using best-practice guidelines and follow strict copyright owner requirements for access – Scholars are allowed on-site to have access – National archives are evolving their ability to provide catastrophic recovery of “Lost” works – Some receive funding from the government and some are thinking about operating cost recovery mechanisms using business-like approaches

Product Solution archives Product Solutions archives are provided by Publishers, and not-for-profits such as Portico, and even governments such as PubMed Central. Generally, – Most publishers call their stores “archives” when they are not at all oriented toward archiving – Some of these Product Solutions archives are interested in providing content provision solutions (sometimes for gaining market power or economic stability) – Other than the publishers, offering these solutions require that content deposits be irrevocably deposited – Access varies, though it is sometimes required that you are part of an authorized user community (or in the case of a publisher: a subscriber)

Run-Your-Own archives Run-Your-Own archives are emerging and include D-Space, LOCKSS, Stevan Harnad’s eprints, fedora, and other type of Institutional Repositories. Generally, – At this time mostly the Type 2 variety of content is stored in these archives, though many institutional repositories store Type 1 content – These archives are only beginning to store Type 3 content and interoperability with other repositories is still not well defined

Community Based archives Community Based archives are only in the beginning stages of evolution. Generally, – Efforts to globally index and link silos of information across and between institutional repositories may become a community based archive type – CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a community based initiative

Critical factors that will make digital scholarly archives a success Governance: Who is in control? Will governments censor? Is there an archivist or librarian running it? Economic Stability: How is it funded? By libraries and/or publishers? Does making money through sexy access conflict with preservation and other interests? Is there any control over how the money is charged or spent? What happens when governance or priorities of an organization change? Technical Soundness: Is it really an archive? Are the standards open to scrutiny? Can the community decide on file formats, data migration, and distribution? Community Acceptance: In the end, will libraries forgo their own “Archive” development efforts because there is an acceptable solution for digitally archiving scholarly content?

Initiative type Governance & Content Censorship Cost level for Publishers/ Institutions and Risk Technical SoundnessAccess Control Community Acceptance National/ Government PossibleMinimal/ Minimal Reasonable/ high Content Rights Holders can deny access acceptable Private/public not-for-profit & corporate (archiving products and run-your-own) Moderate (single Administrative control) Mid to High/ Unbounded Unknown Content Rights Holders can deny access mixed Community collectively run No (multiple administrative control) Low/ Minimal CLOCKSS is LOCKSS based and somewhat proven Community managed, broad access rights ceded in the case of orphaned and non-accessible content via the publishers site Likely to be acceptable

Any questions…?