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 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 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 how likely is catastrophe? betting on who stays in business 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.