Digital preservation

What is digital preservation?  

Scholarly publications are increasingly produced in electronic, non-physical formats, and so it has become more and more important to archive the content in perpetuity and facilitate continuing access. A set of processes and activities have been developed by the community to guarantee that information in digital formats is sustainably preserved, backed up, and accessible to endure any technological, economic, environmental, and political circumstance.  

How does OUP ensure content is available for the long-term?  

In addition to maintaining our own digital archive, Oxford University Press (OUP) also participates in dark-archive initiatives such as Portico and CLOCKSS/LOCKSS. These long-term repositories provide safeguards to ensure that the content we publish will be perpetually accessible, even if our website became unavailable or a journal ceased publication. They also ensure the usability of the archived content over time by migrating the files to new file formats as technology evolves.  

Portico

Portico  is a not-for-profit organization, launched in 2005 with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Library of Congress, that preserves scholarly literature published in electronic form for participating publishers and libraries.  

CLOCKSS

CLOCKSS  (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a community-governed and supported digital preservation archive for scholarly content. Created by publishers and librarians in 1999, CLOCKSS is a collaboration between the publishing industry and the library community and is based on the LOCKSS open-source archiving system. It ensures the long term preservation and availability of member publishers’ content through a decentralized infrastructure at 12 leading academic institutions worldwide.