The quick guide: Key learnings from this course

After finishing the five chapters of this course, this cheat sheet summarises the most important points and key words for you:

1. Understanding Digital Preservation
• Definition: Digital preservation involves a series of managed activities to ensure continued access to digital materials over time, despite technological changes or media failures.
• Goals: Maintaining authenticity, integrity, and usability of digital objects. This involves bitstream preservation (data integrity), logical preservation (format migration or emulation), and semantic preservation (context)
2. Importance of Digital Preservation for Scholarly Journals
• Research Integrity: Ensures that research remains accurate, reliable, and traceable over time.
• Continued Access: Preserved content remains accessible even if the journal ceases publication.
• Compliance: Meets standards and requirements set by Crossref, Plan S, and the Diamond OA Standard.
3. Digital Preservation Services
• LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe): Distributed network ensuring permanent availability through multiple copies.
• PKP PN (Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network): Free service for OJS users to safeguard journal content based on LOCKSS.
• CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) and Portico are led by libraries and publishers. They are dark archives ensuring long-term preservation and republishing the content in case the publisher cannot do it anymore
• Internet Archive: Captures and preserves digital content, including scholarly publications, for public access, maintains Fatcat Wiki visualizing preservation status for multiple journals
• PubMed Central (PMC): Preserves biomedical and life sciences literature with compliance to metadata and format standards.
4. Free Preservation Options for Diamond OA Journals
• PKP PN: For OJS users, offering automated preservation with minimal maintenance.
• DOAJ JASPER Project: Allows journals listed in DOAJ to apply for preservation via CLOCKSS and Internet Archive.
• There are also other LOCKSS Networks, national and institutional options for preserving scholarly content.
5. Ensuring Content Archivability and Accessibility After Discontinuation
• Persistent Identifiers: Use persistent identifiers to ensure that your journal's articles and metadata may be collected and archived by others
• Open licenses: Use open licenses (and a self-archiving policy) to encourage authors to archive their articles in repositories.
• Technical Quality Checks: Ensures files are of good technical quality and meet preservation standards.
• Format Validation: Automated process to verify file standards and quality.
• Checksums: Ensures data integrity during transfers.
• Enhanced Formats: Managing enhanced data to maintain interoperability and archivability.
• Trigger Events: Defined workflows to republish content when a journal ceases publication
• Communication: Importance of maintaining contact with preservation services for smooth content access.