1. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publications E-Journals & ePrints
Flecker: “Preserving Scholarly E-Journals”, D-Lib Magazine 7(9), 2001
Pinfield and Harnish: “The Digital Preservation of e-Prints”, D-Lib Magazine 9(9), 2003
Glenn Bunton
2/12/2004

2. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
Preserving Scholarly E-Journals
“For research libraries, the long-term preservation of digital collections may well be the most important issue in digital libraries”
E-journals are the single largest and easily the fastest growing digital collection within academic libraries today
The ODU libraries experience

3. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
Preserving Scholarly E-Journals
Preservation in the paper and digital eras: Distinctions
Paper era:
inherent library function
large-scale redundancy
Institutional responsibility

4. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
Preserving Scholarly E-Journals
Preservation in the paper and digital eras: Distinctions (cont.)
Digital era:
External access provider
Little redundancy or replication
Institutional roadblocks

5. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
Preserving Scholarly E-Journals
Mellon/CLIR Initiative
One-year planning grants
Six planning grants, one technical grant
Publisher-oriented, Subject-oriented, “Dynamic e-journals”

6. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
Preserving Scholarly E-Journals
Mellon/CLIR Initiative – Key assumptions
Archives should be independent of but in active partnership with publishers
Archives should address preservation over very long timeframes (100 years)
Archives should conform to standards and best practices and be subject to auditing and certification
Archives should be based on OAIS
Fewer total archives will require focus not only on local users but the general community of subscribers and readers.

7. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
Preserving Scholarly E-Journals
Harvard Planning Grant – Questions/Issues
Publisher/Archiver/Subscriber relationship
Archive content accessibility
“dark”
When accessible
Who can access
What to content to archive
Normalization and translation of content
Standardization of “ingestion”
Objects or bits
Funding/payment

8. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
Preserving Scholarly E-Journals
Follow-up Information
Digital Library Federation page

9. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
The Digital Preservation of e-Prints
e-Print Definition
Electronic versions of research papers or similar research output
Pre-prints
Post-prints
Other

10. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
The Digital Preservation of e-Prints
The Question of Preservation – Competing or complimentary perspectives?
Perspective 1: The immediate need is for population of e-Print archives with content. Preservation, at best, should not be a priority and at worst may be a distraction

11. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
The Digital Preservation of e-Prints
The Question of Preservation – Competing or complimentary perspectives?
Perspective 2: Preservation should be an important aspect of an e-Print repository. Some would suggest it irresponsible to offer a repository without preservation components in place.

12. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
The Digital Preservation of e-Prints
The UK SHERPA Project – a complimentary approach
13 open-access e-Print repositories
Use of OAI-PMH and eprints.org software
Investigation of OAIS application

13. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
The Digital Preservation of e-Prints
The UK SHERPA Project – AHDS study
Technical challenges
Relatively straightforward – “paper documents made electronic”
Overcoming hardware/software/format obsolescence
Need for preservation metadata
Self-contained nature only temporary

14. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
The Digital Preservation of e-Prints
The UK SHERPA Project – AHDS study
Organizational/Managerial challenges
The funding challenge – stable funding streams/cost models
Management models – institutional, consortial, other
Content question – what to preserve?

15. Digital Preservation and Scholarly Publishing
The Digital Preservation of e-Prints
The e-Print Challenge
The need for strong institutional commitment
The value of the complimentary approach
Preservation for access