One of the fundamental problems with open access scholarly publishing has been ensuring the preservation of these materials. There are both structural (eg roles and responsibility questions) and funding challenges here which have long been familiar to those looking at large scale digital preservation strategies.
The Keepers Registry effort, which started at EDINA and is now hosted at the International ISSN Center in Paris, has been a vital observation mechanism for tracking progress on digital preservation of serials broadly, but has also tried to focus some particular attention on the open access issues. (Disclosure: I’ve long been involved with the Keepers work, and am very proud to serve on their Technical Advisory Board. I think this is an incredibly important strategic program, and I urge all CNI members to support it. For more information, you can find several presentations on their work at recent CNI meetings on our website.)
Given this context, I’m delighted to share an announcement and a link to a project to focus effort on these at-risk open access publications. This is an extraordinary collaboration among the Keepers Registry, DOAJ, the Internet Archive, CLOCKSS, and PKP. See
https://doaj.org/preservation/
for more details. There’s also a blog post at
https://blog.doaj.org/2021/09/29/jasper-preserving-open-access-journals-forever/
I’d invite CNI member institutions to explore ways to advance this important effort. We’ll have reports on this work at upcoming CNI events.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
