Gaëlle Béquet
Director
ISSN International Centre
Thomas Padilla
Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services
Internet Archive
This session will describe several multi-institutional efforts to ensure persistent accessibility of open access (OA) scholarship, especially at-risk scholarly publications that have few resources for long-term preservation. In 2021, the paper “Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals” highlighted the lack of preservation infrastructure for many smaller academic journals. Representatives from ISSN and the Internet Archive (IA) will describe local projects, their organizational partnership to pursue this work, and collective efforts to mitigate the possible ephemerality of smaller online academic publications. Starting in 2018, the IA pursued a large-scale project to build a complete collection of OA scholarly outputs that are published on the web, the IA Scholar project. While the program originated to solve the challenges of a lack of preservation infrastructure for many “long-tail” publishers, it also has illuminated the benefits of multi-custodialism, i.e. that digital archives have affordances that enable their preservation and accessibility at a variety of complementary stewardship organizations. This talk will describe the current status of the IA Scholar project, how related data-sharing efforts have advanced a multi-custodial approach to ensuring both preservation and access to essential scholarly knowledge, and how these archives can be shared and stewarded by a diverse set of organizations. The IA is a partner in the Keepers Registry service managed by the ISSN International Center. This service aggregates information on the long-term preservation of digitized and digital journals provided by leading archiving agencies around the globe. It has expanded rapidly in recent years, with new partnerships involving archiving agencies such as Biblioteca nacional de España and TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology in Germany. Moreover, the service has evolved to offer statistics to measure archival coverage by country, as well as a service for diagnosing and retrieving the archival status of periodical collections. The elaboration of an ambitious international development program for the years to come will build on these achievements to attract archiving agencies from the Global South. Both presenting organizations are also participants in Project JASPER, a combined effort of ISSN IC, the Directory of OA Journals, IA, CLOCKSS, and the Public Knowledge Project, to build technical integrations that ensure at-risk journals can access digital preservation services, free of charge, that are embedded into their existing workflows. The session will highlight collaborative and strategic work for the digital preservation of OA scholarship and also discuss the work of Project Jasper to provide archiving and access services to scholarship from underrepresented nations. This presentation included contributions from Jefferson Bailey, Director, Archiving & Data Services, Internet Archive.
https://scholar.archive.org/
https://keepers.issn.org
https://doaj.org/preservation/
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24460