0.8 Online hosting issues and options  (Page 8/11)

Digital preservation and archiving

Perpetual access presupposes that provision has been made for the long-term digital preservation of a journal. Many publishers handle the digital preservation and archiving of online journals through services such as JSTOR (22%), Portico (40%), Portico is a Mellon-funded electronic archiving service that includes policies and procedures for post-cancellation access to online journal content. See (External Link) . For a breakdown of digital archiving arrangements, see Cox and Cox (2008), 66. Stanford University’s LOCKSS (41%), LOCKSS provides ongoing online access in the event of a catastrophic loss of access, not a preservation and migration solution such as that provided by Portico. See (External Link) . and (especially in Europe) commercial firms that have made arrangements with national libraries. The Dutch Royal Library has been especially active in this regard. See (External Link) .

Whether a society can offer guarantees about the preservation of a journal’s online content will depend in part on the journal’s submission policy for digital formats. A conservative approach would be to limit digital submissions to specified formats for which preservation practices and protocols exist. This would allow the journal’s content to participate in existing digital preservation programs. A journal could still accept new, non-conforming digital formats; however, the society would not be able to guarantee the long-term preservation of such digital objects. A society’s online publishing partner will be able to help identify the digital formats that have existing preservation standards.

Author rights issues

When journals were published primarily in print, author rights received relatively little attention. In a networked environment, however, where an individual article can easily be posted and propagated online, the issue receives greater attention from both authors and publishers. For an overview of author rights issues, see Bailey (2008) and Morris (2009).

Author rights comprise a number of issues, with copyright retention and self-archiving rights foremost among them. For a society-sponsored journal, whose author base is often coextensive with the society’s membership, balancing author rights and publisher prerogatives is more than sound business practice: it is central to the society’s identity as a membership organization. It makes sense, therefore, for a society’s copyright and author rights policies to accommodate the needs of its members.

Self-archiving

Increasingly, individual authors are asserting a right to self-archive a digital version of an article on their personal Web site, in a repository at their host institution, or in a subject-based repository. There are subject-based repositories in a number of disciplines. However, the largest and most active (for example, arXiv in high energy physics and RePEc in economics and mathematics) are those in fields where a tradition of exchanging print pre-prints was prevalent. Although self-archiving has been cited as a latent threat to journal subscriptions, See Beckett and Inger (2006). its effect on a journal’s revenue will often be limited to a marginal loss of pay-per-view revenue.