To preserve scientific research results for access in future generations, independent preservation is of utmost importance, Journals may cease to exist, databases may become corrupted or other events may destroy access to published research.
Next to the journal’s own preservation activities (for example by local backup),, five major systems for the preservation of digital content are worth being discussed in more detail.
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization committed to preserving digital content and ensuring it remains accessible for future generations. With advancements in artificial intelligence and data storage, the Internet Archive is continually evolving to meet the demands of a digital-first world. As data continues to grow exponentially, its mission to preserve and provide access to knowledge becomes even more vital. Whether for education, research, or personal exploration, the Internet Archive ensures that the wealth of digital information remains accessible for generations to come. It owns and operates its own non-profit data centers, stewards over 50 petabytes of archived data, and provides open-source tools and services for digitization, web archiving, digital preservation, web, and data services, including the Wayback Machine and IA Scholar. Since its inception in 1996, it has grown into one of the largest digital libraries in the world. Journals can choose to have their website content archived by the Internet Archive too.
JASPER (JournAlS are Preserved forevER): An initiative by DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Keepers Registry, PKP and Internet Archive focusses on preserving open-access journals to prevent them from disappearing from the internet. Journals need to be Open Access and be indexed in DOAJ to use this service.
Portico: A not-for-profit organization that preserves scholarly literature published in electronic form, ensuring perpetual access even if a journal ceases publication. At the time of publication, Portico works with 1297 libraries and 1227 publishers, preserving the content of more than 40,000 e-journals and around 2.5 Million ebooks.
The LOCKSS Program at Stanford Libraries provides open-source technologies and services for high-confidence, resilient, secure digital preservation. LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a widely-accepted best practice in the digital preservation field and more broadly for ensuring the persistence of digital information.
The Global LOCKSS network provides for Local preservation of electronic journals and books for post-cancellation access, post-disappearance access, and failover access, at 80 libraries and counting.
CLOCKSS is a leading digital archive for academic publishers and research libraries. CLOCKSS is a dark archive: a secure and restricted repository designed for the long-term preservation of digital content.
Unlike traditional archives that are actively accessed and used, a dark archive remains largely inaccessible to the public, only being used for restoration or recovery purposes in the event of a disaster, data corruption, or othersignificant disruptions. CLOCKSS preserves books, journals and related materials like datasets.To ensure that information about our archival holdings is widely available, CLOCKSS also participates in the Keepers Registry run by the ISSN International Centre. The Keepers Registry aggregates preservation information provided by participating preservation agencies to make it easier to discover what is preserved where.
New reports are made available to the Keepers Registry on the first day of the month at around 12:00 UTC. Major indexing services like DOAJ, Web of Science and SCOPUS encourage journals to preserve their content using one of the above services
