How the Archival Record of Scholarly Digital Works is Created, Made Available and Maintained

  1. Publishers Invest in the Cost of Creating and Maintaining Archives of Published Scholarly Literature. Scientists and scholars advance knowledge by building on the work of their peers and predecessors from earlier generations. The integrity of the scholarly work done now and in the future is dependent upon the existence of a permanent, validated and definitive record of the work of others. Historically, when scholarly literature was primarily distributed in print, libraries undertook the burden of maintaining archival copies of printed articles. Now that most scholarly communication takes place online, publishers have largely taken on the role of creating and maintaining the digital archival record of knowledge, incurring considerable expenses to do so.
    • Journal publishing has existed for hundreds of years. Since e-journals have existed only since the 1990’s, a significant body of research material was not originally available in digital form. To make the history of research conveniently available to those working now, many publishers have made very substantial investments related to digitizing and creating retrospective archives of scholarly literature. This undertaking requires much more than simply scanning the pages of print journals: (1) content must be tagged (i.e., internally indexed and labeled so that the content can be searched and specific information with the document can be located); (2) references must be electronically linked to the articles they cite; (3) persistent identifiers (such as “digital object identifiers” or “DOIs”) must be assigned so that the newly digitized content can become a part of the overall scientific record.
    • Over a million new peer-reviewed articles are published each year. In addition, millions of articles published in the past, some dating back hundreds of years, have been scanned and digitized. Thanks to investments in infrastructure required to validate and to preserve published journal articles, and the efforts of publishers, libraries and archives, an estimated 29 million articles have been archived and are instantly available at the user’s desktop today.1
  2. Publishers Cooperate with Other Publishers, Libraries, Archives and Government Agencies to Ensure the Preservation, Availability and Accessibility of the Scholarly Record. The following is just a partial list of the activities and organizations in which publishers are participating to accomplish these goals:
    • CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/) was formed in 2000 by the scholarly publishing community as an independent, non-profit, member supported organization. CrossRef assigns and maintains persistent digital identifiers (“digital object identifiers” or “DOIs”) for journal articles and other scholarly works that are used to facilitate linking between online resources and discovery of scholarly research. By mid-2008, CrossRef had registered 32.3 million DOIs from 20,814 journals, 67,943 books and 13,122 conference proceedings, along with 118,655 DOIs for components (e.g. images, datasets and tables) of journal articles and book chapters.2 As of May of 2008, the total number of registered DOIs had increased to almost 31.2 million. This permits consistent and efficient linking of citations throughout a vast wealth of online scholarly material.
    • Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu) is a not-for-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to a comprehensive selection of prestigious humanities and social sciences journals.
    • Highwire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu) is a division of Stanford University Libraries, which produces the online versions of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content through partnerships with scholarly societies, university presses and publishers. HighWire Press makes almost 2 million scientific articles available without subscription, to aid in the digital dissemination of primary scientific information.
    • Portico (http://www.portico.org/) was founded in 2002 with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, to provide a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals. With the cooperation of journal publishers (participating on a voluntary basis) and libraries, Portico now has commitments of more than 10,000,000 articles from thousands of journals, preserved in a persistent archival format, and has started archiving e-books as well.
    • Jstor (www.jstor.org) provides archival storage and digital access to scholarly materials originally distributed in print through licenses from participating publishers.
    • Artstor (http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml) is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities and social sciences, with a set of tools to view, present and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.
    • Clockss (http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home) is a partnership of publishers and libraries working to achieve a sustainable, globally distributed archive of scholarly e-content, to ensure reliable long-term access. During the pilot (completed in Spring 2008), six U.S.-based libraries and one in the U.K participated in the program, along with eleven publishers (including several of the largest scholarly publishers), together accounting for thousands of journals. The ongoing transition to formal, post-pilot operations is attracting additional libraries and publishers.

More Publishing Facts:

1 See http://www.crossref.org.

1 Pentz, “CrossRef at the crossroads” LEARNED PUBLISHING, October 2006 (copy available for download through the ALPSP website (http://www.alpsp.org) or at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp).