Working with Open Access Titles
From LOCKSS
Open Access publishers are delighted for libraries to collect and to preserve their materials, and LOCKSS is particularly well suited for this task:
- Look and feel, and historical context are preserved. This is critical to a scholar's ability to interpret the content.
- Open Access titles, especially in the Humanities have large quantities of many formats (video, audio, javascript, etc). LOCKSS is format agnostic.
- There is no charge for publishers to participate in the LOCKSS program; most open access publishers are operating on extremely marginal business models.
- It is very easy for open access publishers to make their materials "LOCKSS compliant".
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[edit] Identify Titles
The LOCKSS Program is about libraries building and preserving local collections. Therefore, we urge libraries to identify open access titles that are relevant to their local collections. There are two approaches, both good:
- Work as an individual selector just keeping in mind your institution's needs
- Work as a group of like-minded subject specialists.
Contact Us to make sure your title isn't already in process.
[edit] Obtain Publisher Permission to Nominate Title for Preservation
Write to the title's publisher and/or editor and ask if the selected title can be nominated for LOCKSS preservation.
- SAMPLE EMAIL TO PUBLISHER
Dear Publisher,
NAME OF LOCKSS ALLIANCE LIBRARY has chosen your open access journal, NAME OF TITLE, as a candidate for digital preservation through the LOCKSS Program (www.lockss.org). Digital content is much more fragile than physical copies of journals, and we believe that it is an important function of libraries to preserve content such as yours for future readers. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is an international non-profit initiative that provides the infrastructure for libraries to preserve and provide tomorrow's readers access to today's web published materials. The system replicates the traditional model of libraries keeping physical copies of journals in their collections, and makes it possible for libraries to house copies of digital materials long-term.
We would like to request your permission to nominate this title for inclusion, and if ten other libraries within the LOCKSS Alliance choose to add it to their collections, it will be preserved. Should your site become unavailable, the material collected by LOCKSS would be preserved at the Alliance Member libraries. This process is completely free of cost to you.
If you would like to accept this nomination, only two actions will be required of you. You will need to put a LOCKSS permission statement (an html string) onto your website. You will also need to contact the LOCKSS technical team (publishers@lockss.org) to answer a few questions about your website.
We would like to congratulate you on the high quality of research published by NAME OF TITLE , and we hope that you share in our view that it is essential to preserve this digital academic content for the users of the future.
Sincerely,
[edit] Send Nomination to the LOCKSS Alliance List
When the publisher says it's ok to nominate the title, send this information to the LOCKSS Alliance team Contact Us
[edit] That's It
If enough libraries are interested in adding this title to their collections, the LOCKSS team will process the title and distribute it to the LOCKSS Alliance membership for collection and preservation.
SEE ALSO: The [OpenLOCKSS project], funded by JISC and led by the University of Glasgow. This project is working to preserve UK Open Access titles in the LOCKSS Program.
