CLOCKSS: Preservation Strategy

CLOCKSS: Preservation Strategy

Philosophy

The CLOCKSS Archive is engaged in a global campaign to preserve digital academic content. This content is largely accessed from and under control of content providers (e.g., publishers), and it is no longer served from or curated within institutional libraries. The risk is that access could be severed at any time via natural disaster, human error, corporate failure, etc. and the community needs to provide a mechanism to ensure continued access to such resources over time. As the defining mission statement of the CLOCKSS Archive emphasizes, to ensure access to published scholarly content over time, a community-governed partnership of publishers and libraries working to achieve a sustainable and globally distributed archive is essential.

The scope of the academic content is broad. The content pursued must be Web-published. The Collection Development Policy is the general guideline and is referenced to assist with selection and acquisition decisions. The approach is to seek content that is comprehensive (subscribed and unsubscribed) held by host libraries. The content is preserved for future instances of the same academically-oriented readers around the globe for which the content was originally published (see CLOCKSS: Designated Community). The CLOCKSS Archive is dark; no access is permitted to the content it holds unless and until the CLOCKSS Board determines that a trigger event has taken place. If a trigger event takes place, the relevant content is extracted from the CLOCKSS Archive and transferred to one or more re-publishing platforms under a Creative Commons license (see CLOCKSS: Extracting Triggered Content). The Creative Commons license means that anyone can re-publish the triggered content; the current re-publishing platforms are run by Stanford and Edinburgh Universities.

The CLOCKSS Archive represents a long-term commitment and requires a regular review every three years to check its relevance, the technology paradigm, and the funding model. The focus of the review is revisiting the CLOCKSS Archive's strategy for archiving scholarly content given that the larger publishers are much more engaged than the very many small publishers. The effort develops ideas regarding the preservation of small publishing entities, including the rapidly growing Open Access publications.

Business Implementation

The Business Goals are developed to project the revenues amounts from the operational sources: Publisher Annual Fees, Publisher Ingest Fees, Library Support Fees, and Library Node Annual Fees. These revenues directly support the technical work provided by the LOCKSS team, the upgrade and maintenance of the network, and the outreach efforts.

1. Objective: Partner with as many academic publishers as possible
   1. Goal: Try to avoid too much duplication, except among the largest of publishers.
   2. Goal: Focus on the up and coming Open Access publisher content, which is at most risk of disappearing.
2. Objective: Development of the Library Supporter base
3. Objective: Timely ingest of content
   1. Goal: Continue process improvements to capture more content more quickly.
   2. Goal: Review locations of ingest boxes to determine optimal access for international content.
   3. Goal: Continued improvement of reporting on preserved content regardless of source.
4. Objective: Responsibility
   1. Goal: The Executive Director in conjunction with the Executive Committee will be responsible for updating the Business and Technical Implementation sections of this Preservation Strategy. The current Review Schedule is set to include:
      1. Comprehensive revision set initially for every five years.
      2. Targets revised each year.

Progress against the business aspects of the strategy is reviewed at each meeting of the CLOCKSS Board, and any necessary changes to the strategy discussed and approved.

Technical Implementation

The technical realization of this strategy is to:

• Ingest content in either harvest or file transfer form, see Definition of SIP.
• Preserve the content unchanged:
  • against the threats described in CLOCKSS: Threats and Mitigations,
  • in a geographically distributed, carefully controlled, network,
  • by means of the LOCKSS: Polling and Repair Protocol.
• Permit no access to the content in the network.
• When content is triggered, transfer it:
  • by the process described in CLOCKSS: Extracting Triggered Content:
  • under Creative Commons license,
  • if necessary after format migration (see LOCKSS: Format Migration),
  • to multiple sites willing to make it accessible to the CLOCKSS: Designated Community.

Progress in implementing the CLOCKSS: Collection Development policy using this technical realization is reported to the CLOCKSS Board regularly (see the External Reports section of CLOCKSS: Logging and Records). The impact of changes in technology and community practice is under continuous monitoring by the LOCKSS team (see the Awareness section of CLOCKSS: Threats and Mitigations). Current examples of the review process in operation include:

• Improvements to report generation described in CLOCKSS: Logging and Records.
• Improvements to the process for removing AUs from the ingest boxes described in CLOCKSS: Ingest Pipeline.
• Improvements to the network monitoring and data analysis tools described in CLOCKSS: Logging and Records.
• Improvements to the LOCKSS: Polling and Repair Protocol.

Relevant Documents

1. CLOCKSS: Collection Development
2. CLOCKSS: Extracting Triggered Content
3. CLOCKSS: Mission Statement
4. CLOCKSS: Designated Community
5. CLOCKSS: Threats and Mitigations
6. LOCKSS: Format Migration
7. LOCKSS: Polling and Repair Protocol
8. CLOCKSS: Logging and Records
9. CLOCKSS: Ingest Pipeline
10. CLOCKSS Bylaws (available on request)
11. CLOCKSS Board meeting minutes (available on request)