Today the CLOCKSS Archive announced that the University of Michigan Press and CLOCKSS have signed an Agreement for the preservation of the e-books in University of Michigan Press’s forthcoming UMP Ebook Collection which will be hosted on the innovative Fulcrum publishing platform. Initially this will include 1000+ backlist books from University of Michigan Press and around 80 new titles a year for direct sale to libraries. More backlist titles will be added during the next few years and the agreement will be expanded to include other publishers hosted on Fulcrum, including the groundbreaking open access publishing program from Lever Press.
CLOCKSS and Michigan are both committed to solving the issues surrounding the publication and preservation of new forms of digital scholarship. The Fulcrum platform supports e-books with enhanced features, such as A Mid-Republican House from Gabii and Animal Acts.
“Enhanced e-books, and interactive scholarly works, can include dynamic, interactive, and media-rich components that present special challenges for preservation,” said CLOCKSS Executive Director Craig Van Dyck. “We look forward to continuing to work with Michigan and other stakeholders to address these issues, so these emerging forms of scholarship can find a sustainable publishing model, and be preserved for the long-term.”
“We’re excited to be partnering with CLOCKSS not only to provide a robust preservation solution for our text-first EPUB3 and PDF titles, but also to push the envelope for enhanced media-rich ebooks and interactive scholarly works,” added Charles Watkinson, Director of University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian for Publishing at University of Michigan Library.
About CLOCKSS
A collaboration of the world’s leading academic publishers and research libraries, CLOCKSS (www.clockss.org) provides a sustainable dark archive to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly content. CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) employs a unique approach to archiving (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) that was initiated by Stanford Libraries in 1999. Digital content is stored in the CLOCKSS archive with no user access unless a “trigger” event occurs. The LOCKSS technology regularly checks the validity of the stored data and preserves it for the long term. CLOCKSS operates 12 archive nodes at leading academic institutions worldwide, preserving the authoritative versions of over 30 million digital journal articles, 25,000 serials, and 80,000 book titles, and a growing collection of supplementary materials and metadata information. So far 53 titles have been triggered and made available from the CLOCKSS Archive via open access. A strong and secure organization, CLOCKSS is supported by 300 supporting libraries and 260 participating publishers.