digital preservation

JASPER preservation service

Open access journals must be preserved forever

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

Long-term archiving of scholarship is paramount, but too often publishers don't realise it or lack the resources to act on 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

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
J. Bosman et al. OA Diamond Journals Study. https://zenodo.org/record/4558704

The service

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

Work out which archiving option might be the best fit for the publisher
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
Direct the journal to the most appropriate archiving option

For publishers

To ensure our resources are focussed on those journals that need assistance the most, there are 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 provides the JASPER service free of charge. Because JASPER is currently free of charge, we analyse the financial status of journals or publishers closely. We reserve the right not to include a journal or 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 step is necessary 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

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 correct version of the OJS software to participate. JASPER will ensure journals are directed 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.
The upload route: journals indicate to DOAJ that they wish to preserve their content in the CLOCKSS archive, provided by LOCKSS. DOAJ matches the full text you send with the article metadata we hold. We send everything to a remote folder. From this single location, CLOCKSS and Internet Archive (and, later, other “Keepers”) collect the content.
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 also allow Route 1 journals to participate in other routes.

For the Keepers

Adding new journals to a preservation service often involves costs. JASPER significantly reduces these costs by using DOAJ as a common interface to the thousands of journals it indexes. By delivering content to an Internet Archive-hosted FTP server, JASPER unifies content deliveries into a single format and makes them available from a single location. 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 help us preserve valuable scholarly content for the long term in a 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. The CLOCKSS archive operates 12 archive nodes at leading academic institutions worldwide, via LOCKSS technology. This secure, robust, and decentralised infrastructure can withstand threats from technological, economic, environmental, and political failures. A destructive event in one location doesn’t jeopardise 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. If content disappears from the web, we retrieve it from our dark archive and make it 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 helping journals enter long-term digital preservation schemes, DOAJ fulfils its mission by ensuring these crucial scholarly records remain accessible, visible, and in use.

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 organisations for preservation and access to the cultural and scholarly record in digital form. It owns and operates its own non-profit data centres, stewards over 50 petabytes of archived data, and provides open-source tools and services for digitisation, 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 any OJS journal running an up-to-date version of OJS can use.