Preserving Knowledge: The Power of Collaboration between OAPEN Foundation and CLOCKSS
Ronald Snijder
Thu 03 Oct 2024
by Gali Halevi, Collections Director for the CLOCKSS archive and Ronald Snijder, CTO and Head of Research at OAPEN
In the digital age, ensuring the long-term preservation and accessibility of academic and scholarly books is more crucial than ever. Partnership between CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Foundation is proving crucial.
The partnership began in 2022 when CLOCKSS, DOAB and the OAPEN Library commissioned research from Mikael Laakso[1]. Utilizing open bibliometric data sources, this study answered three questions: 1) How prevalent are OA books, 2) what web domains are responsible for offering full-text access to these OA books, and 3) to what degree can OA books be verified to be archived in trusted preservation services. Of 396 995 unique OA book records only 19% were found to be included in at least one preservation service. The results caused alarm and concern for the long tail of OA books. Read more here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7305489 .
Action required! CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Library to the rescue!
In partnership we have connected our services to safeguard valuable longform scholarship. This collaboration has been particularly powerful for smaller publishers who often lack the resources to independently secure the future of their publications. For this reason, we have concentrated on publishers that have added a small number of books available in the OAPEN Library. This group is actually quite large: we identified 164 publishers that fall within this category.
However, this is not the only thing that has come out of our cooperation. We also prepared the OAPEN Library to comply with the requirements for preservation in the Global LOCKSS Network (GLN). All book records in the Library contain a machine readable description of the licence. The GLN checks the licence on those records and ingests content with a Creative Commons licence. And this adds up, as OAPEN hosts more than 32,000 titles that have been licenced that way already and is set to grow!
The Community Comes Together
Community support has been central to the success of both CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Library. By engaging with libraries, publishers, and academic institutions, these services have expanded their capabilities and better served the needs of the scholarly community. The involvement of diverse stakeholders has driven continuous improvement, making OAPEN and CLOCKSS more inclusive and comprehensive resources for the global academic community.
The growth of OAPEN and CLOCKSS has been marked by an unwavering commitment to transparency and collaboration. By working closely with partners and the academic community, we have developed policies and practices that align with the needs and values of their users. This collaborative approach not only strengthens their infrastructure but also fosters a sense of shared responsibility among contributors.
CLOCKSS and OAPEN demonstrate a strong commitment to biblioequity by ensuring the broad and inclusive dissemination and curation of scholarly knowledge from around the world, in multiple languages. This commitment guarantees that all users, regardless of their financial resources or geographical location, have ongoing access to a diverse range of scholarly works. Both organizations promote biblioequity by supporting open access to content, which enhances accessibility and discoverability of academic resources. By providing open repositories and encouraging open access publishing, CLOCKSS and OAPEN remove barriers to knowledge, fostering a more equitable distribution of educational resources globally. Together, CLOCKSS and OAPEN play a crucial role in promoting equitable access to information, supporting a more inclusive and diverse global scholarly community.
Planning for the Future
Looking ahead, the OAPEN Library and CLOCKSS are poised to continue their growth, building on their strong foundation of community support, reliable data preservation, and a commitment to open access. By maintaining these core principles, we will remain vital resources for the global academic community, contributing to the broader movement toward more equitable and accessible scholarly communication.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the partnership between OAPEN and CLOCKSS will be essential in preserving the durability of knowledge, ensuring that scholarly output remains accessible and secure for generations to come.
About CLOCKSS: CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit, community-driven digital archive dedicated to the long-term preservation of academic content. It ensures the enduring availability of scholarly literature by securely archiving digital content from academic publishers and making it freely accessible under an open access license if the content becomes unavailable from any publisher or database. By utilizing a decentralized preservation model, CLOCKSS maintains multiple copies of digital content across a network of geographically distributed nodes, safeguarding against data loss due to technical failures or economic challenges faced by publishers. This robust approach to digital preservation supports the academic community’s need for reliable, long-term access to scholarly materials, thereby playing a vital role in maintaining the integrity and continuity of academic knowledge over time.
About the OAPEN Foundation: OAPEN started out as a project funded by the European Commission and became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2011. The OAPEN Library hosts, disseminates, and facilitates the preservation of open access books. The OAPEN Foundation launched the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in 2012, inspired and supported by DOAJ. It indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. DOAB became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2019, managed by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition. The OAPEN Foundation also manages the OAPEN Open Access Toolkit, which aims to help book authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books.
[1] Laakso, M. (2023). Open access books through open data sources: Assessing prevalence, providers, and preservation. Journal of Documentation, 79(7), 157–177. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2023-0016