Dear All: It is important not to confuse the ALPSP http://www.alpsp.org/biogs291102.htm notice below, which is about publisher archiving initiatives for online preservation of their proprietary digital contents, with the open-access initiative and author/institution self-archiving. They are almost exact opposites!
Currently, journal content (c. 20,000 journals, 2 million articles per year) is increasingly digital, but still accessible only through access tolls (subscription/license/pay-per-view). The objective of the Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ and many allied movements is to create toll-free access to all those articles through either of two means: author/institution self-archiving or open-access journals. The resulting toll-free, open-access archives are not the ones that are the subject of the ALPSP meeting announced below! The meeting below is about the archiving of the journals' toll-based digital contents. This is why the focus is not on the generic technical issues of archiving and preservation, some of which might be common to toll-access and open-access archives, but rather on "implementation, policy, licensing and business models." What this means is this: In the past, journals were in paper, sold by susbscription, and "archived" on the shelves of individual and library subscribers (plus some national deposit libraries), in paper. The publisher might also have stored some (paper) back issues, but as there is almost no market for back issues, this was not an important concern for publishers. Archiving and preservation were the responsibility of certain of their consumers: libraries. In the digital age, where online licenses are complementing and gradually replacing paper subscriptions, there is the question of access and preservation of digital contents after the term of a license (typically annual). Who holds the digital content and ensures that it is continuously migrated, preserved and accessible as technologies evolve? These are interesting and important questions, but they concern contents that are "born" toll-based. As there is not much revenue from back issues, publishers will no doubt be willing to share or cede the digital preservation burden to libraries; and of course if they retain the burden, they will need to recover its costs, perhaps by making even the legacy literature toll-based rather than open-access. Either way, these implementation/policy/licensing/business archiving concerns are irrelevant to the archiving concerns of those who are trying to make this literature open-access. (Only perhaps some technical matters overlap.) On the contrary, once open-access prevails, the toll-access publishers' archiving concerns may well become moot, as the open-access archives -- distributed across the world's author-institutions, and integrated by the "glue" of OAI-interoperability and harvestability -- will be both the locus classicus of the literature and the corpus that is to be preserved, not the publishers' proprietary toll-access versions. So if you are interested in open-access archiving you are unlikely to find much that is useful at this ALPSP archiving workshop (except if the technical issues prove to surface more substantially than anticipated in the ALPSP notice). Instead of attending a workshop on how to preserve publishers' toll-based archives, the best step authors and their institutions can take toward digital preservation is to self-archive their own work in their own institutional archives. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation Stevan Harnad > On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, Debbie Stoddart wrote: > > If you would like to register for a place on the Archiving seminar, > please telephone + 44( 0)1245 260571, fax +44 (0)1245 260935, or go to > www.alpsp.org/s291102.htm for a full programme and online booking form. > > 9th Publishing and the Internet Seminar. Archiving - Whose problem is it? > Friday 29th November, City Conference Centre, 80 Coleman St, London EC2R 5BJ > Chair: David Bull, Palgrave Macmillan > > There are challenges for us all - publishers, authors, librarians, > national libraries, intermediaries and aggregators - in maintaining > access to digital resources over time. By its very nature the subject > 'archiving' has become broad with multiple meanings and aspects. This > seminar will focus on issues specific to long-term archival preservation. > While technical issues are rarely far from the surface, the seminar will > concentrate on implementation, policy, licensing and business models. > > Who should attend? > > Editorial and financial people who are concerned with content > preservation. > > Debbie Stoddart > Marketing Coordinator > Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers > > > Tel: +44 (0) 1780 757005 > Email: [email protected] > > ALPSP website http://www.alpsp.org.
