Remaining Future Proof
Publishers and Digital Preservation
Eefke Smit
STM Director Standards and Technology
Berlin, APE 2014 Conference,
January 29, 2014
Preservation – why ?
“Alles van Waarde is Weerloos”
All Things of Value are Defenceless
Lucebert
Dutch Poet, 1924-1994
Why DIGITAL preservation is important,
especially in STM environments
Essential in STM publishing environments
1. Authors seek the eternal life via their
publications
2. Publishers build the future Records of Science
3. Libraries wish to assure future access
4. Users wish to consult the collective memory
And all is now digital,
And digital stuff is extremely brittle.
The Dangers of Decay for anything Digital
• See Atlas of Digital Damages
• Digital Decay can be caused by:
– Software is not backwards compatible
– Hardware no longer exists
– Storage medium unaccessible or decayed: bit rot !
– Computer environment no longer supported
– Website no longer exists, URL broken
– Repository holders have disappeared
– Location of files unclear, unknown
– Metadata unreadable or incomprehendible
– Access mechanisms broken (DRM)
Publishers collaborate in many initiatives
• Portico, Clockss, KB e-depot, BL, APA, Aparsen
• See the Keepers Registery (thekeepers.org): covers
22.000 ISSNs
• Combination of preservation strategies:
Outsourcing, normalisation, migration, emulation
• Agreements on disaster recovery and long term access
Does your organisation have a policy for
preservation of digital publications?
Number of journals
covered in survey
55%
No /
don't
know
7%
Yes
84%
n = 9050
34%
No
8%
10%
Don't Know
8%
0%
20%
40%
<50 journals
60%
80%
100%
Yes
93%
>50 journals
5
What matters most for publishers in DP
Solutions exist for:
• Independent digital
archives:
E-Depot, Portico,
Clockss
• Tools and services
• Persistent Identifiers:
DOIs widely used
• Stakeholder
collaboration
Yet to be solved
• How many archives?
• Audits and Certification on future
reliability
• Bringing down costs
• Standards for metadating
• New identifiers pop up:
interoperability framework
needed
• More stakeholder collaboration
needed
• Chain solutions, from cradle to
archive
APARSEN, working towards a
Centre of Excellence
• Aim: bring coherence, cohesion and continuity in digital
•
•
•
•
•
preservation among a wide variety of stakeholder
groups
Project has 31 partners in 13 EU-countries
STM was a founding member of APA
Objective: Create a Centre of Excellence for tools,
services, consulting, research
Takes digital preservation to a higher level of
recognition
Raising awareness -> idenitifying gaps-> providing
recommendations -> sharing best practice
APARSEN Network of Excellence
Impressions
Important for publishers in APARSEN
• Trust in the reliability of repositories:
– Self assessments (DSA)
– Monitored self-auditing (Nestor – DIN approach)
– Full certification ISO 16363
• Common metadating standards
– Solve the identifier soup via interoperability frameworks
– Collaboration throughout the chain
• Costs and requirements for depositing content
– Cost modeling and cost comparing (see 4C project)
– Business models
– Innovation and research in easier ways of preservation
The New Challenges
• Digital Preservation is not just about texts and documents,
•
•
•
•
•
•
it is multimedia
In STM the new challenge is Research Data and Open
Access solutions
Publications will increasingly be multi-versioned, multisourced and multi-media
See STM statements on working together with trustworthy
digital repositories
Ensure bi-directional linking between data and
publications,
Agree on and ensure the use of persistent identifiers (DOI,
ORCID, ISNI)
Ensure integration of multimedia data and publications
“Hell is a place where nothing
connects to nothing”
T.S. Eliott in his introduction to Dante’s Inferno.
He added:
“We are in the business of finding connections--within
texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and
ourselves, between our readings and …etc”
How does this relate to Digital Preservation ?
In Digital Preservation we are creating the connections
to the future, in order to make sure that the future can
make connections back to us.
Questions?
Eefke Smit
International STM Association
Smit@stm-assoc.org