Research Guides: Journal Publishing: Preservation

Preservation

While long term preservation is usually not an immediate concern when starting a new journal, finding the right approach is essential for ensuring that your articles remain accessible to readers in the long term.

There are many ways to approach digital preservation for a journal. Should the website remain online in perpetuity? Or just the articles themselves as files in PDF, HTML, or another format? If you are partnering with an organization that provides preservation services, what promises do they make regarding the preservation of your journal?

Content Guidelines

We are especially interested in this issue at NYU Libraries! Jonathan Greenberg and Deb Verhoff have published "Guidelines for Preserving New Forms of Scholarship," which provides thorough yet practical suggestions for making your content more preservable. These guidelines are geared toward scholarship that makes use of digital features such as embedded audiovisual content, complex interactive features, or that depend on third-party software, but may be helpful for “vanilla” digital publications as well. Contact us if you are interested in discussing how these Guidelines can be applied to your journal.

Guidelines for Preserving New Forms of Scholarship

NYU Services

Faculty Digital Archive
NYU's institutional repository, the Faculty Digital Archive (FDA) can support journal publishing in multiple ways. For instance, for authors interested in self-archiving their publications (i.e. Green Open Access), the FDA is an ideal place to upload and share your work. Additionally, as a stable, long-term preservation-level repository, the FDA can be used to archive copies of articles. Finally, a journal may use the FDA as the hosting location for the version-of-record article files. In any of these arrangements, in the event that a journal stops operating, the FDA would become the primary platform for the journal’s content.

External Services

Portico
A community-supported preservation archive that safeguards access to digital journals, books, and collections. Although their services have an annual fee, they are one of the most established and trusted groups providing digital preservation services for academic journals.
CLOCKSS
Similar to Portico, CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) also provides paid digital preservation services aimed specifically at academic journals. See a comparison of Portico and CLOCKSS (PDF).
Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive is an enormous repository of websites, many of them captured by automated crawlers that traverse the web. Users can also have the Wayback Machine crawl and archive websites by supplying URLs. Know that, as is true for a lot of web archiving software, pages archived by the Internet Archive’s software are prone to errors and lacunae. Especially if the Wayback Machine holds the only archived copies of your journal issues, be sure to check those archived versions after you submit them.
Archive-It
A subscription service provided by the Internet Archive, where you leverage the Internet Archive's digital preservation infrastructure and have greater control over what content is preserved and at what frequency.
Webrecorder
Webrecorder maintains a suite of free, high-quality web archiving tools targeted at a range of users. Webrecorder’s software, some of which requires manual operation, will generally result in archived copies with fewer errors and lacunae than traditional web archiving software.
Conifer
A web archiving service based on Webrecorder’s software. It uses a freemium model where accounts require payment after a certain amount of storage is used. Some platforms, such as OJS [link up to OJS in platform section], provide their own preservation service; others offer deposit with third-party services such as CLOCKSS or Portico.