Existing pathways to preservation: Archiving challenges for small publishers series

This post is part of a short series of posts regarding some of the challenges that exist for small publishers of open access monographs. Other posts discuss link rot and metadata challenges.

We have identified three main pathways for publishers to archive and preserve the works they publish. We will outline these below which brief highlights of advantages and challenges: 

• Do it yourself

  • Advantages

    • You know exactly where and what is being preserved and you can have more control over metadata, place of preservation etc.

  • Disadvantages:

    • You may not consider the time taken to “do” preservation to be worth it

    • You may not have the expertise within the press to do preservation

    • There may be additional costs which you haven’t budgeted for

    • without a solid plan, the preservation may end when the press closes which means that the works haven’t actually been preserved

• Using an aggregator to do the preservation for you. Many presses already send their works to an aggregator and many of these aggregators have a relationship with a preservation organisation or service (see below).

  • Advantages

    • The preservation is conducted external to your press so it will continue even if your press closes

    • You don’t need to worry about the preservation because it is the responsibility of someone else

    • The aggregator is probably doing this for a number of presses (or all of the content they aggregator) so will have a strong relationship with the preservation service of choice

    • An expert and dedicated service is preserving your work

    • Many of your aggregators may use different preservation services which means that your works are preserved in a number of places

  • Disadvantages

    • The aggregator may only present the works in a particular format (e.g. pdf, epub etc.). This may mean that only that medium is preserved.

    • The aggregator may request a subset of your metadata which means not all the metadata you create may be preserved alongside the work.

    • The preservation service may request a subset of the metadata you originally sent to the aggregator which means more metadata is lost

• Send your content directly to a preservation service

  • Advantages

    • You have a direct relationship with the preservation service and full visibility of what is preserved

    • An expert and dedicated service is preserving your content

• Disadvantages

  • A potential cost – which may increase as your press gets larger

  • The service may require metadata in a specific form which is extra to your usual standards and formats

  In reality, an individual press may use a hybrid model and have a relationship with a preservation service and send content to preservation services via an aggregator. Some presses will also do bits of preservation themselves whilst also using an aggregator. No one solution is the best, but different models will work best for different publishers. The key is to understand what you want from the archiving and preservation offering and if the chosen route to preservation works for you.

  With the Thoth Open Archiving Network we are working to be a complement to existing preservation services whilst also providing a service to a specific sub-set of publishers. Our ethos is that open works should always remain open and we are working to make the works we are archiving openly available whilst they are archived. Many of the presses we work with want their open access works to remain open access and not to be closed whilst being archived. However, theses presses also work with aggregators, who work with preservation services who do keep the archived version closed (for technical and historical reasons in many cases) until a trigger event is reached when the work becomes open access through the preservation platform. As such, these open access presses are working with a hybrid model.

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