Hello everyone,
Martin Eve of CrossRef has some sobering news for us all. If there's no preservation service protecting the content to which a DOI is assigned, then if a publisher goes out of business or stops publishing a title, the DOI will stop working.
The bad news is that for c. 2 million articles in his sample, he could find no evidence of preservation. This scholarship is immediately at risk. Scholarly content needs to be preserved before something bad happens.
The good news is 4.3 million of the works he studied were preserved in at least in one place. “That's not utterly terrible, and this under-counts preservation, because we haven’t got data from every archive everywhere. I’m also not looking at green archives, although there’s still debate about whether such platforms can constitute adequate preservation. It is true that simple hosting in an institutional repository is not the same as triplicate redundancy preservation in dark archives.”
Librarians have an important role to play in encouraging, indeed requiring, proper preservation. A toolkit to support you, including model license language, is available here: https://liblicense.crl.edu/resources/digital-preservation/
You can read more about Martin Eve’s sobering discoveries here: https://clockss.org/martin-eve-crossref-the-digital-preservation-of-7-5-million-items/
With best wishes,
Alicia
Dr Alicia Wise
Executive Director
CLOCKSS