digital preservation

JASPER preservation service

Open access journals must be preserved forever

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JASPER (JournAlS are Preserved forevER) is an initiative to preserve open access journals. Originally a project, it was launched on World Preservation Day 2020 and is in response to research* that shows that online journals—both open and closed access journals—can disappear from the internet.

Long-term archiving of scholarship is of paramount importance, but too often, publishers don't realise this or don't have the resources to do anything about it. Authors want to ensure their contributions to the scholarly record will be permanent. Scholars must be able to access all of the published research in their fields, both now and long into the future.

As a scholarly community, we are pledged to eliminate the possibility that high-value resources can disappear*. JASPER aims to close the gap in preservation coverage among open access journals.

Questions? Email us.

*References

  1. M. Laakso, M. Matthias, N. Jahn. Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Feb. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24460
  2. J. Bosman et al. OA Diamond Journals Study. https://zenodo.org/record/4558704

The service

The premise of JASPER is that all journals are different, with different needs, priorities and resources. The workflow offers viable alternatives to journals so that they engage with one or more archiving services that meet their requirements and capacities. The process is simple:

  1. work out which archiving option might be the best fit for the publisher
  2. establish the level where the amount of effort is manageable by the publisher, based on:
    • platform
    • ability to send article metadata to DOAJ
    • the ability to export and zip full text, images etc
  3. direct the journal to the most appropriate archiving option

For publishers

We hope that many DOAJ-indexed publishers will want to take part but to ensure our resources are focussed, we have eligibility criteria:

  • Your journal must be indexed in DOAJ
  • The journal's article abstracts must be indexed in DOAJ
  • Your journal may not charge any fees or be subsidised in any way.
  • A commercial contract with an archiving solution does not already cover your journal.
  • Your content is licensed with a CC BY licence (sometimes, we will accept less open licenses).
  • The copyright of published content remains with the author.

DOAJ is committed to providing the JASPER service free of charge. Since the JASPER service is currently free of charge, we will analyse the financial status of journals or publishers quite closely. We reserve the right not to include a journal or a publisher in JASPER if we think it is or could be supported or funded by an organisation capable of covering the costs of long-term preservation. This is a necessary step while JASPER remains free of charge.

To apply

If your journal meets the criteria above, you may apply here. If you have any questions about these criteria, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Presentar solicitud

Si su revista cumple con los criterios anteriores, puede presentar su solicitud aquí. Si tiene alguna pregunta sobre estos criterios, no dude en ponerse en contacto.

Different archiving options

  1. The OJS route: OJS journals can use the PKP PN preservation service which is built on LOCKSS software. You must enable a plugin in the journal's dashboard and agree to some simple terms. However, your journal must be on the right version of the OJS software to take part. JASPER will ensure that the journals are pointed to the guidance they need to upgrade and become compliant. Journals on OJS may also choose to have their content preserved via the upload route below.

  2. The upload route: journals indicate to DOAJ that they wish to preserve their content with CLOCKSS. DOAJ matches the full text sent to us with the article metadata that we hold. We send everything to a remote folder. From this single location, archiving agencies, such as CLOCKSS and Internet Archive (and, later, other “Keepers”) collect the content.

  3. The web-crawling route: if you cannot or do not want to export article metadata and full text, your journal website details will be provided to the Internet Archive for inclusion in a best-effort, automated web harvesting.

More copies, better preservation

It is always safer for a journal’s content to be archived in more than one place, ideally, in at least three. To simplify this for smaller publishers, journals opting for Route 2 will automatically have their content preserved via Route 3. Future plans will allow Route 1 journals to participate in other routes, too.

For the Keepers

There are often costs associated with adding new journals to a preservation service. JASPER aims to significantly reduce these costs by using DOAJ as a common interface to the thousands of journals indexed in it. By delivering content to an FTP server hosted by Internet Archive, content deliveries are unified into a single format and available from a single location. If you want to join JASPER, get in touch.

For libraries and universities

Long-term digital preservation is a profoundly important mission for libraries, universities, and other memory organisations. By supporting JASPER, you are helping us preserve valuable scholarly content for the long term and in a very cost-effective way. Thank you for your continuing support!

About the service partners

CLOCKSS

CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit collaboration of leading academic publishers and research libraries. Our mission is to ensure the long-term survival of digital scholarly content and instil confidence in authors, scholars, policymakers, libraries and publishers worldwide that their content will be safely and securely preserved for future generations. We are entrusted with the long-term preservation of more than 51 million journal articles and 400,000 scholarly books. CLOCKSS operates 12 archive nodes at leading academic institutions worldwide. This secure, robust, and decentralized infrastructure can withstand threats from technological, economic, environmental, and political failures. A destructive event in one location doesn’t jeopardize the survival of preserved digital content because the 11 other locations serve as mirror sites to back up and repair the disrupted location’s archive. Content is triggered from our dark archive if it disappears from the web and is made available to everyone under an Open Access license.

DOAJ

DOAJ is the largest, most diverse, free directory of open access journals in the world. DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. By assisting journals to become archived in long-term digital preservation schemes, DOAJ fulfils its mission by ensuring accessibility, visibility and usage of these crucial scholarly records.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the mission of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Since 1996, it has worked with over 1,000 universities, libraries, archives, governments, non-profits, and other memory and social good organizations for preservation and access to the cultural and scholarly record in digital form. It owns and operates its own non-profit data centers, stewards over 50 petabytes of archived data, and provides open-source tools and services for digitization, web archiving, digital preservation, web, and data services, including the Wayback Machine and IA Scholar.

Keepers Registry

Keepers Registry is the global monitor on the archiving arrangements for continuing resources managed by the ISSN International Centre and fuelled by reports from contributing archiving agencies.

PKP

A research and development initiative within Simon Fraser University’s Core Facilities Program, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) develops (free) open-source software. It carries out research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. As part of its mandate to make knowledge public, PKP understands that preserving and maintaining long-term access to published content is paramount. To support this, PKP has launched a Preservation Network, a freely available private LOCKSS network that can be used by any OJS journal running an up-to-date version of OJS. PKP welcomes the opportunity to participate in JASPER with our colleagues at DOAJ, Keepers Registry, Internet Archive and CLOCKSS.