Findings of the 2CUL Study on Developing e-Journal Preservation Strategies
Faculty and students have increasing dependency on commercially-produced, born-digital content that is purchased or licensed. According to a recent Ithaka S+R study on information usage practices and perceptions, almost half of the respondents strongly agreed that they would be happy to see hard copy collections of journals discarded and replaced entirely by electronic collections (see Figure below). This strong usage trend raises some questions about the future security of e-journals and if and how they are archived to ensure enduring access for future users. Evidence indicates that the extent of e-journal preservation has not kept pace with the growth of electronic publication. Studies comparing the e-journal holdings of major research libraries with the titles currently preserved by the key preservation agencies have consistently found that only 25-30%, at most, of the titles with ISSN’s currently collected have been preserved.
With funding from the Mellon Foundation, during 2014-2015 Columbia and Cornell Universities (2CUL) conducted a 2-year project to evaluate strategies for expanding e-journal preservation. The project team included Shannon Regan, Joyce McDonough, Bob Wolven (co-PI) from Columbia University Libraries and Oya Y. Rieger (co-PI) from Cornell University Library. It was a follow-up study to expand on the results of a Phase 1 2CUL project that looked into a number of pragmatic issues involved into deploying LOCKSS and Portico at Cornell and Columbia. The key research questions of the Mellon-funded study included: What is not being preserved?; Why are they not being preserved?; and How do we get them preserved? The purpose of this blog is to share some of the key recommendations and highlight challenges faced during the study. The report that describes the methodology and findings of the study is available on the project wiki.
Recommendations for Further Action
Major Publishers: As libraries and licensing agencies negotiate new licenses or renew existing licenses, publishers should be asked to specify any licensed content excluded from the license’s provisions for archiving. We need to engage CRL to explore how the recently revised model license can be further enhanced by broadening the archival information section.
Ensuring Continuity: The preservation status of e-journal titles may change as titles move from one publisher to another. The Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service maintained by the UKSG provides information that could be effectively used to monitor such changes.
Open Access E-Journals: Freely accessible e-journals comprise the largest, most diverse, and in all likelihood most problematic category for preservation. Columbia and Cornell will work with members of the Ivy Plus group of libraries to assess the feasibility and cost of implementing a Private LOCKSS Network to preserve the pilot collection developed in Archive-It.
Technical Development: As digital formats become more complex and new research methods emerge (e.g., text mining), just-in-case dark archiving solutions will be harder to justify from cost-effectiveness and return-on-investment perspectives. It will be beneficial for the stakeholders to reconsider the current assumptions that underlie significant initiatives such as CLOCKSS, LOCKSS and Portico.
Information Exchange: At present, up-to-date information about preservation status is not included in the systems and knowledge-bases libraries use to manage e-journal content (although the Keepers Registry has significantly enhanced the ability to query the preservation status of individual titles). This inhibits libraries’ ability to consider preservation as a factor in collection development and collection management.
Setting Priorities: One barrier to effective action has been the sheer number of e-journal titles that are not preserved. More discussion among libraries is needed to build consensus around priorities for action on titles provided through aggregators and on freely-accessible e-journals.
University/Library Publishers: University libraries engaged in publishing should develop a consistent approach to preservation, including open declaration of their archiving policies and practice. This work should help to inform, and be informed by, CRL’s exploration of a “TRAC light” certification.
Challenges
The project team’s most significant impediment was simply the time required to explain the purpose of the project, including libraries’ expectations and needs regarding preservation of e-journals, to many parties with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Publishers, editors, and aggregators each had different degrees of awareness of issues, but also different understanding of the meaning of terms such as “preservation” and “archiving.” Adding to this challenge was the fact that preservation is not the highest priority for most of the parties we worked with.
Perhaps the most surprising challenge was the degree of questioning we encountered within the library community itself regarding the importance of taking action to preserve e-journals. This was expressed as a combination of (in our view, misplaced) confidence that publishers and aggregators can be relied on to archive their own content, plus doubts about the technical and economic reliability of existing third-party preservation agencies. The reluctance from librarians to aggressively pursue e-journal preservation may be influenced by confusion as to where the responsibility for preservation lies: with publishers, third party agencies, or libraries.
Individual libraries, despite their concern for preservation, often lack effective means for taking action. Selection and acquisition processes may not involve any direct interaction with the publisher; many titles are acquired as parts of large packages, with no comprehensive provision for preservation. While stewardship of print journals was recognized as a core function of libraries, today commercial publishers provide access to digital content and manage content. Preservation, formerly a distributed activity for printed material controlled at the local level, has come to rely on centralized infrastructures and action in the case of digital material, without clearly defined roles for those staff charged with responsibility for preserving library collections. Some libraries have sought to include provisions for archiving in their e-journal licenses, either through direct deposit of content with the library or, more often, through third-party agencies.
E-journal archiving responsibility is distributed and elusive. Therefore, libraries, archiving organizations, publishers, and societies need to collaborate in developing and promoting best practices such as model license agreements and practical steps leading to the deposit of e-journal content with recognized preservation agencies.
Oya Y. Rieger, July 2016