Institutional Repositories, Long Term Preservation and the changing nature of Scholarly Publications

Abstract

In Europe over 2.5 million publications of universities and research institutions are stored in institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories make these publications accessible over time, a repository does not have the task to preserve the content for the long term. Some countries have developed an infrastructure dedicated to sustainability. The Netherlands is one of those countries. The Dutch situation could be regarded as a successful example of how long term preservation of scholarly publications is organised through an open access environment. In this contribution to the Open Repository Conference 2010 it will be explained how this infrastructure is structured, and some preservation issues related to it will be discussed. This contribution is based on the long term preservation studies into Enhanced Publications, performed in the FP7 project DRIVER II (2007-2009, Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research II, WP 4 Technology Watch Report, part 2, Long-term Preservation Technologies (Deliverable 4.3/Milestone 4.2). http://www.driver-repository.eu/. The official report is downloadable at: http://research.kb.nl/DRIVERII/resources/DRIVER_II_D4_3-M2_demonstrator_LTP__final_1_0_.pdf ; the public version is part of Enhanced Publications : Linking Publications and Research Data in Digital Repositories, by Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer et al. Amsterdam, AUP, 2009, p. 157-209; downloadable as: http://dare.uva.nl/aup/nl/record/316849). The overall conclusion of the DRIVER studies about long term preservation is that the issues are rather of an organisational nature than of a technical one.