Preserving the Scholarly Commons in the Digital Era

Abstract

From page 2:

"Academic libraries have traditionally preserved the scholarly record in printed form by buying books and journals from publishers for their local researchers, teachers, and students. They store these works in protective environments, fix bindings and pages when necessary, and microfilm or digitize those volumes in danger of deterioration. Today, increasing numbers of scholars are contributing articles to electronic journals and taking part in projects to publish electronic books, and they support their scholarship with citations to related digital materials as well as to more traditional sources. Such electronic scholarship is as important for the cultural record and the building of knowledge as printed publications have been, and is therefore as important to preserve. But libraries generally do not buy electronic journals and books. They rent them. So who is taking responsibility for preserving these materials?

"Although it is relatively easy to make a persuasive case for why digital preservation is necessary, an impressive array of factors and incentives--including the fundamental shift from buying to renting--leads otherwise well-intentioned actors in different directions. Meanwhile, digital materials are proving to be fragile and fleeting with potentially serious consequences for the scholarly commons. Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive to preserve portions of the Web, estimates that a Web object now has an average life expectancy of 100 days (Weiss 2003). Mortality is also high for Web-based scholarly literature. A study published in Science in October 2003 found that more than 30 percent of the articles in selected high impact medical and scientific journals contained one or more Internet references, but 'the percentage of inactive Internet references increased from 3.8% at 3 months to 10% at 15 months and to 13% at 27 months after publication' (Dellavalle 2003:787). A similar study conducted in 2001 found that the percentage of inactive Internet references increased from 23 percent at two years to 53 percent at seven years after publication (Lawrence 2001). With additional effort, many of the works cited in the inactive references could still be found, but the results of these studies clearly indicate that the digital ecology of the scholarly commons is less than stable, and its preservation is far from assured.

"In this paper, I focus specifically on the problem of preserving electronic scholarly journals (e-journals). To provide a framework for analyzing the problem and possible solutions, I first define it as a problem of preserving a commons, and then explore key roles and organizational models in the preservation process. I conclude by identifying key features of what might emerge as community-based preservation efforts."