Preserving the outputs of scholarly communication for the long term: a review of recent developments in digital preservation for electronic journal content

Abstract

Since their origins in the seventeenth century, scientific journals have become an essential part of the process of science and scholarship. The scientific literature is cumulative, enabling researchers to build upon the work of those that have gone be-fore them through acknowledgment and citation. John Ziman has noted that the cita-tion of references validates many of the claims made in published papers and embeds them in the pre-existing consensus [1]. Until very recently, research and national libraries took most responsibility for the long-term stewardship of this part of the scientific record, working collectively to ensure continued access to the content of printed journals. While this system was not perfect in every single way, its success in preserving content of value was based upon distribution and redundancy. Dale Flecker has pointed out that in the print era, libraries subscribed to and maintained large and highly redundant collections of journal content, also investing in a range of activities intended to maintain usability but which also actively supported their long-term preservation [2]. As elaborated by Sadie Honey, since multiple libraries sub-scribe to and process the same journals, there is a high-probability that at least one copy, if not multiple copies, of each issue of those journals will be available for future scholars [3]. In the digital environment, however, all this has changed. Research projects in the 1980s first proved that electronic journals were feasible. In the last years of that decade, journal publishers began to experiment with deliver-ing journal content through online networks, starting with initiatives like ADONIS and the American Chemical Society's Chemical Journals Online service. However, it was the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium in the early 1990s that acted as a catalyst for the widespread adoption of electronic publishing methods by journal publishers. Initially, the use of technology was conservative; creating online services that in the majority of cases provided parallel access to journals that were usually also available in printed form [4]. Over time, however, many new features have been added to the electronic versions of journals, meaning that publishers increasingly treat them as the versions of record [5]. In addition, in order to meet user demands and to save costs, many libraries are now beginning to cancel print subscriptions in favour of

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.