How open access diamond journals comply with industry standards exemplified by Plan S technical requirements

Purpose:
This study investigated how well current open access (OA) diamond journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and a survey conform to Plan S requirements, including licenses, peer review, author copyright, unique article identifiers, digital archiving, and machine-readable licenses.
Method:
Data obtained from DOAJ journals and surveyed journals from mid-June to mid-July 2020 were analyzed for a variety of Plan S requirements. The results were presented using descriptive statistics.
Results:
Out of 1,465 journals that answered, 1,137 (77.0%) reported compliance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) principles. The peer review types used by OA diamond journals were double-blind (6,339), blind (2,070), peer review (not otherwise specified, 1,879), open peer review (42), and editorial review (118) out of 10,449 DOAJ journals. An author copyright retention policy was adopted by 5,090 out of 10,448 OA diamond journals (48.7%) in DOAJ. Of the unique article identifiers, 5,702 (54.6%) were digital object identifiers, 58 (0.6%) were handles, and 14 (0.1%) were uniform resource names, while 4,675 (44.7%) used none. Out of 1,619 surveyed journals, the archiving solutions were national libraries (n=170, 10.5%), Portico (n=67, 4.1%), PubMed Central (n=15, 0.9%), PKP PN (n=91, 5.6%), LOCKSS (n=136, 8.4%), CLOCKSS (n=87, 5.4%), the National Computing Center for Higher Education (n=6, 0.3%), others (n=69, 4.3%), no policy (n=855, 52.8%), and no reply (n=123, 7.6%). Article-level metadata deposition was done by 8,145 out of 10,449 OA diamond journals (78.0%) in DOAJ.
Conclusion:
OA diamond journals’ compliance with industry standards exemplified by the Plan S technical requirements was insufficient, except for the peer review type.

Project JASPER: a progress report – DOAJ News Service

“Project JASPER was announced on World Preservation Day in November 2020. 

The initiative was launched by DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Internet Archive, ISSN International Centre (Keepers Registry) and Public Knowledge Project to address the problem of open access journals disappearing from the web. 

So, where are we as we start 2023?

We have developed the DOAJ interface so that indexed publishers can opt in to preservation at the push of a button.
DOAJ and CLOCKSS have signed an agreement to remove some of the paperwork formerly required from each publisher, thereby streamlining the process.
There is a human support system in place, so these publishers have a friendly and streamlined journey – this crosses all the partner organizations and has been surprisingly challenging to orchestrate.
The questionnaire we use to assess journals wanting to be part of JASPER is now available in 3 languages: Arabic, English, and Spanish. We’re hoping to add more languages soon.
A technical pipeline exists so that content and structured metadata swish seamlessly from DOAJ into Internet Archive to one or more preservation services.
Nine journals have completed the process and have either delivered content and metadata or have been archived via Internet Archive’s automated web crawling.
Most importantly, we have been able to preserve scholar-led journals published in countries such as Croatia, Finland, Ireland, North Macedonia, Poland & Sri Lanka.
The project partners coordinated to produce a list of Ukrainian journals using OJS so that Internet Archive could ensure they were added to their web archiving initiative….”

ATG Interviews Alicia Wise, Executive Director of CLOCKSS – Charleston Hub

“ATG:  When you accepted the position, you remarked that CLOCKSS was “a profoundly important service.”  For those unfamiliar with CLOCKSS and its mission, can you tell us why it’s so important?  What essential services does CLOCKSS offer to those in the world of scholarly communications?  Is there anything unique about those services?

AW:  The mission of the CLOCKSS archive is to ensure the scholarly record remains available for humanity.  Scholars have worked so hard to advance knowledge, and their hard work is important to us all and especially to those scholars who will build on this foundation in the future.  Digital preservation is too big a job for any single organization, and even were it possible, it’s too important a job to entrust to any single organization, and so the community approach of CLOCKSS along with, and more broadly, LOCKSS is inspiring.

At CLOCKSS we focus on electronic publications.  Initially this meant books and journals, but now it means books, journals, and much more.  We are preserving all the rich resources that underpin articles and books (think data, protocols, software, visualizations), and entirely new forms of scholarship too (think scholar-led, interactive humanities resources published by academics or libraries).

CLOCKSS is a dark archive which means the content entrusted to us is made accessible only after the original or successor creators and publishers are no longer able to look after it.  When CLOCKSS provides access to the content, it becomes open access to everyone in perpetuity. …”

Project Jasper: the story so far – DOAJ News Service

“The initiative was launched by DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry and Public Knowledge Project to start addressing the problem of open access journals disappearing from the web. We thought it was time for another update on what has been going on behind the scenes over the last few months.

Initially a scoping exercise, Phase One has subsequently seen the project partners design, implement and test a process for workflow efficiencies, capacity and usability. Articles from a number of journals have been ingested and documentation has been updated. Along the way, knowledge has been gained and valuable lessons have been learned 

The lessons relate to this project and preservation, but some may also apply to other publishing-related needs that smaller journals find challenging so we thought it would be useful to record our learnings and share them….”

Partnering with publishers to break down barriers to preserving new forms of scholarship – Digital Preservation Coalition

“NYU Libraries initiated a project, in partnership with Portico, CLOCKSS, and five university presses that aimed to better understand the limits of current preservation approaches when applied to new forms of scholarly publication. The project, which I described in a previous blog post, focused on a diverse selection of open access monograph-like publications with features that made them more complex to preserve than traditional text-and-image publications. …”

Open access journals must be preserved forever | Public Knowledge Project

“PKP is delighted, on this World Preservation Day, to share an important update on Project JASPER, our partnership with DOAJ, Internet Archive, CLOCKSS and Keepers Registry. We initiated Project JASPER a year ago with an express goal to preserve no-fee journal content all over the world – much of which is published on Open Journal Systems. We have made great strides in a year, which you can read all about below or on the JASPER website, and are looking forward to what the coming year brings as well.

Project JASPER (JournAlS are Preserved forevER) is an initiative to preserve open access journals. 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 just disappear from the internet. This happens because of a lack of awareness amongst smaller publishers around the need for long-term digital preservation and/or the resources to enroll a journal in a long-term digital preservation scheme….”

A collaborative approach to preserving at-risk open access journals | Zenodo

Abstract:  In the September 2020 preprint “Open is not forever”, (Laakso et al.) discuss the high number of Open Access journals that disappear from the web. It is a known problem in the digital preservation world that long-tail journals are especially at-risk of disappearing. Five leading parties are now collaborating to address this problem: the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), CLOCKSS, Internet Archive, the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN), and International ISSN / Keepers Registry. Building from the existing DOAJ infrastructure, we are establishing a central hub where preservation agencies can harvest consistent metadata, and access full-text. Each of the preservation partners offers somewhat different solutions for publishers to preserve their content. The project will offer free and low-cost options for preservation and access. In the first phase, the target is diamond OA journals (those with no author processing charges), because these are the journals that are least likely to participate in a preservation service and hence are most at-risk of disappearing. The project is currently coordinating technical designs, service development, infrastructure, and sustainability planning.

 

CLOCKSS is Collaborating to Improve the Preservation of Open Access Journals – CLOCKSS

“DOAJ, CLOCKSS Archive, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry/ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have agreed to partner to provide an alternative pathway for the preservation of small-scale, APC-free, Open Access journals.

The recent study authored by M.Laakso, L.Matthias, and N.Jahn has revived academia’s concern over the disappearance of the scholarly record disseminated in Open Access (OA) journals.

Their research focuses on OA journals as at risk of vanishing, and “especially small-scale and APC-free journals […] with limited financial resources” that often “opt for lightweight technical solutions” and “cannot afford to enroll in preservation schemes.” The authors have used data available in the Directory of Open Access Journals to come up with the conclusion that just under half of the journals indexed in DOAJ participate in preservation schemes. Their findings “suggest that current approaches to digital preservation are successful in archiving content from larger journals and established publishing houses but leave behind those that are more at risk.” They call for new preservation initiatives “to develop alternative pathways […] better suited for smaller journals that operate without the support of large, professional publishers.” …”

Executive Director – CLOCKSS

“CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not-for-profit joint venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and academic libraries, whose mission is to build and operate a sustainable, geographically distributed digital preservation service with which to ensure the long-term survival of web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community. CLOCKSS is an international, mission-driven, partnership organization with technical support from the LOCKSS team at Stanford University.

The role of Executive Director is crucial to CLOCKSS. In this role you will run the organization, reporting to the Board via its Co-Chairs, and be responsible for continuing to establish the organization as a major international scholarly archive and as a valuable collaborative community of scholarly publishers and academic libraries….”

CLOCKSS ARCHIVE Announces the Trigger of Eleven Medknow Journals for Open Access – CLOCKSS

“The CLOCKSS Archive today announced that eleven journals have been triggered for open access by the CLOCKSS Board of Directors.

The triggers occurred after Medknow, part of Wolters Kluwer, ceased publishing eleven titles in 2019 and the content would no longer be available online. The publications have been preserved in the CLOCKSS Archive and are openly available to the public via a Creative Commons license….”

Save Tonight (and Fight the Rot of Bits): Open Access and Digital Preservation – Scholarly Communication in Raiderland

“I am writing to you about digital preservation, but this is a scholarly communication blog. So, let’s delve into what preservation has to do with open access. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines open access as ‘the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to uses these articles fully in the digital environment.‘ The simple answer to what digital preservation has to do with access is that we are not only advocating for open access in the here and now but also for continued access in years to come.

In the traditional sense of open access, I will encourage you to pay attention to what open access publishers say about what they intend to do with the work that you submit to them. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) are examples of programs designed to provide publishers with digital preservation tools and networks to ensure the safety of their content. If you are submitting your articles to a publisher who is openly involved with LOCKSS or CLOCKSS, then you can be reasonably assured that they have your best preservation interests at heart. But they’re not the only tools available to publishers, so be a good investigator when you explore your publication possibilities.

This introduction is the first part of two posts about digital preservation and access. Look out for the next post with four simple rules for incorporating digital preservation into your personal research routine.”