Tag Archives: scholarly publishing

Making Sure Your Publications are Digitally Archived for Posterity

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Have you ever wondered:

Who is making sure that the open access, online only, peer-reviewed article that you just published will be digitally preserved and archived for posterity?
So that even if the publisher disappears someday and the journal becomes “abandoned” or “orphaned”, your paper will be “forever” archived somewhere so that it can be accessible for your great, great-grandkids to read?

Thankfully – some great resources exist that can help you investigate the extent to which a journal you are considering submitting a manuscript to is taking measures to ensure that your scholarly work will be digitally archived for posterity.

1. SPI-Hub: Scholarly Publishing Information Hub™ (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) 

From the SPI-Hub websites:

“SPI-Hub™ attempts to provide prospective authors with the available information on quality, rigor, and transparency of the journal publishing industry to aid with informed decision making for the purpose of identifying a publishing avenue.”

Searching for a particular journal title of interest using the SPI-Hub journal search interface will return a range of useful information, including a field under the “Publication Policies” tab that indicates whether or not the journal “Participates in national and international archiving services (e.g., CLOCKSS):”(see below). This SPI-Hub data field is drawing information from another useful resource called the Keepers Registry.
 

2. The Keepers Registry 

The Keepers are “the archiving agencies which act as long-term stewards of the digital content issued as continuing resources including e-serials” and the Keepers Registry “acts as a global monitor on the archiving arrangements for electronic journals”. Basically, the Keepers Registry is resource where you can go to to look up what archiving agencies (if any) a particular journal publisher is using to archive and preserve their journal’s contents. One example of an archiving service that a publisher may be working with is CLOCKSS.

3. CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) 

CLOCKSS operates differently than a tool like PubMed Central (PMC), for example, which is essentially the publicly-accessible full-text repository created by the NIH over 20 years ago to digitally provide access to and archive publications derived from NIH-funded research. In the case of CLOCKSS, participating publishers entrust the long-term preservation of their published content to the CLOCKSS archive which provides “dark storage” (as opposed to making all content publicly and easily accessible to all, as in the case of PMC), however, publishers agree to make their content freely available whenever (if ever) it is “triggered” out of that dark or “closed to the public” storage. 

From: HOW CLOCKSS WORKS

As libraries and publishers migrate from print to online-only publications, they want to know that their shared investments are protected and preserved for generations to come. As a “dark archive” currently housing  48.5 million journal articles, over 34,000 serial and 360,000 book titles, and a wide array of supplementary materials and metadata information, CLOCKSS preserves this growing corpus of online scholarly content. This unique service assures publishers and libraries that the content they steward will withstand potential technological, economic, environmental, and political disruptions and failures and will always be available to those who want to access it, after a trigger event has occurred.

Built with proven LOCKSS open-source technology, CLOCKSS preserves scholarly publications in original formats. The polling-and-repair mechanism ensures the long-term validity of the data.

Mirror repository sites at 12 major academic institutions around the world guarantee long-term preservation and access. Our approach is resilient to threats from potential technological, economic, environmental and political failures.

Questions? Check out the MSK Library’s Support for Authors LibGuide or Ask Us at the MSK Library.

Can I Trust this Publisher? Is this Journal Reputable?

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New journal titles continue to appear on the scholarly publishing landscape on a regular basis, and more and more of them are choosing to follow an open access (OA) publishing model. What distinguishes these OA journals is that, unlike “traditional” journals that follow a model where the author transfers their copyrights to the publisher but does not pay a publication fee, OA journals generally charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) and allow the authors to retain their copyrights to the published work.

One of the unintended negative consequences of the “author-pays” OA model has been the introduction of “predatory” publishers into this landscape. Predatory publishers mislead authors into thinking that their journal provides a rigorous peer review and high-quality scholarly publication process, when in fact, the operation is really just a scam to collect author article processing charges that provides little in return in terms of legitimate peer-reviewed journal article publishing author services. Bottom line for authors – there is no benefit or reward to be had by the author for publishing their research in a publication that is not reputable – only negative consequences (i.e., a waste of their valuable scholarly efforts).

It basically comes down to a consumer protection issue, with the Federal Trade Commission even going after some of the biggest offenders and winning a $50 million court judgment in 2019. Beyond getting individually scammed, there are broader societal implications of contributing to this “publication-pollution” – in the words of NYC Ethicist, Arthur Caplan –  as he described in his 2015 article where he discusses why it is so important for the sake of trust in research that everyone do their part to mitigate the threat of predatory publishing.

What can MSK authors do to verify that a journal is reputable?

The MSK Library’s “Support for Authors” LibGuide includes a variety of both subscription and free resources that can be used to investigate the legitimacy of a journal. The “Evaluating Journal Quality” MSK Library class provides training and live demonstrations of many of these resources that can help authors determine if a potential journal publisher is trustworthy.

Authors can also look for guidance using a resource called Think. Check. Submit, a tool even endorsed by the NIH (see NOT-OD-18-011: Statement on Article Publication Resulting from NIH Funded Research).

 From their website: About | Think. Check. Submit. (thinkchecksubmit.org)

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Through a range of tools and practical resources, this international, cross-sector initiative aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library.