Transcript RSC PPT Template - Digital Preservation Coalition

Trust and eJournals
A view from ALPSP members
RSC perspective
Personal perspective
And other problems
ALPSP members?
For us access is perpetual, i.e. access
continues after cancellation (if you paid for
it then you keep it). That is further ensured
by everything being archived by Portico, i.e.
if we or the journal ceased to exist then
Portico would provide access to past
material from their archive.
Our journals are signed up to LOCKSS. It’s free to us, cheap and relatively
simple for libraries to implement, and has a sound philosophy behind it which
should enable the content to be preserved well into the future whatever the
circumstances. We have not had any kick-back from subscribers on this, so I
guess it must be generally acceptable.
Our journals are hosted by Highwire, and they do have a mechanism in place to
allow access to content subscribed to up to the time of cancellation. This
would be our default position to cover this eventuality, although I don’t believe
we’ve ever had cause to implement it. Although licence contracts often
obsess over this point, and subscribers seem very concerned about the issue,
we cannot recall ever being asked to deliver on it – presumably this reflects a
disconnect between interest in the content at the time the licence is set up,
and a lack of interest leading to a cancellation.
I don’t think there are any particular challenges to this, from our perspective.
LOCKSS works well, required very little input from us even during the set-up
stage, and seems to satisfy subscribers. LOCKSS seems to me to be a better
solution (being distributed and open) than a depository type approach.
 We operate a perpetual access policy (via
HighWire) so that a subscriber who cancels
still has access to the subscribed content (just
as they would still have the paper journals if
they took hard copy). In addition we are also
signed up with both LOCKSS and Portico. This
is very important as far as consortia deals are
concerned, as you know.
Currently we offer all customers perpetual access to the
content they have purchased. This access is via our own
platforms and we provide this service free of charge post
cancellation.
With regards to digital preservation, we deposit our content
with a number of third party aggregators, including
Ingenta, who would be able to offer access to our content
should we become unable to do so. We also deposit to
the BL voluntary deposit scheme and we are also looking
into the options of depositing with Portico or
CLOCKSS/LOCKSS, however the costs are still quite
prohibitive as we have a large volume of content (we are
more a medium publisher than a small publisher now),
and they charge based on the number or articles archived.
Each annual issue of our journal is available as PDF
for download.
Customers have an account, and through this they
have perpetual access to the issue(s) they have
purchased – if they need to, they can login to their
account and re-download the issue.
We store the master copies of the journal in a dark
archive in the institutional repository, who
guarantee maintenance.
At the moment, perpetual access to purchased
online content is preserved through Portico
and CLOCKSS.
When a subscription is cancelled, the subscriber
retains access to what they have paid for,
through our Metapress site, but perpetually
through Portico and CLOCKSS if they are
member institutions.
Other respondents said their publisher (OUP,
CUP) took care of preservation issues for
them.
NB - Does anyone still just send out a CD at the
end of the year?
RSC perspective
 Portico – as our customers require it
 Journals only (at present), books and archive in
progress
 Longer term solution
 Post-subs access through RSC Platform
 LOCKSS and CLOCKSS
 BL voluntary deposit
RSC Perspective
 Content pretty standard and well
understood
 Since 2000
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Update from SGML to XML
Updated from XML to XML v2
Updated XML v2 from DTD to schema
Two platform upgrades
RSC Perspective
Local hosting of archive available
- not many takers (250 Gb of pdf and xml)
Data reused gets upgraded and checked
Bad choices in retrospect....
Supplementary info – Word to PDF
Protect the PDFs to preserve the master copy
My perspective
Services are reassurance and insurance
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how likely is catastrophe?
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betting on who stays in business
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publishers tend to keep stuff available

but a trusted solution important
My perspective
People trust what they can understand
All parties understand the costs, and what they’re
buying
We have done the easy stuff
Evolution to linked information and services, which
will be harder to meaningfully preserve
And other problems?
 Database rot
 In biologics
(expires when the senior academic retires)
 Coming soon to curated data stores near you
 Linked data and swirls of poor and
unattributed data.