The CLOCKSS Archive has had a dynamic twelve months. Here are some highlights.
In this past year, the CLOCKSS Archive has grown by 3.9 million journal articles, to 33.3 million, and by 114,00 books, to 186,000. This represents a 13% growth in journal content, and 158% growth in books (due mainly to the addition of many Springer books). Our holdings will continue to grow at a strong rate in the upcoming years.
We have added 30 new publishers to our system. There is a steady stream of inquiries from publishers who recognize the importance and value of long-term preservation for their digital content. Of particular interest is the Fulcrum platform from the University of Michigan, whose e-books CLOCKSS is beginning to preserve.
Our support from the library community continues to be strong, with 300 libraries on-board, from 13 countries. These libraries recognize the crucial role that they play in the stewardship of the scholarly literature. By supporting the CLOCKSS Archive, libraries help to ensure that their patrons will continue to have access to the resources that they rely upon.
Other important developments over the past twelve months:
- We announced the re-certification of our Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC). CLOCKSS is the first archive to be re-certified. Our score was upgraded for Organizational Infrastructure to the top score of 5. We maintained our top score of 5 for Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, Security. Our total score of 14 out of 15 is the highest score of any of the archives that the Council of Research Libraries has certified.
- We announced our Succession Plan. Stanford University, the University of Alberta, the University of Edinburgh, and Humboldt University committed to continue the long-term preservation of the content in the CLOCKSS system, in the unlikely event of the demise of the CLOCKSS organization. We feel that this is a very robust succession plan. A succession plan is important for any organization, and especially for a long-term preservation service like CLOCKSS.
- CLOCKSS continues to embrace new content types, as scholarly publishing continues to evolve. We are working with the University of Michigan Press and Stanford University Press on the preservation of “interactive scholarly works”, which are cutting-edge e-books with enhanced features such as rich media and non-linear, interactive paths of usage. CLOCKSS is participating in a Mellon-funded grant being led by New York University Press, to explore the preservation of these challenging works. We have begun preserving post-publication comments using the RedLink system. And we are engaged with preprints, and with post-publication peer review content. We are always careful when considering whether to preserve new content types; a committee of the Board of Directors discusses each instance, and in some cases makes a recommendation to the Board that CLOCKSS should preserve new kinds of content.
- CLOCKSS is expanding our web archiving capabilities, working with Rhizome to apply Webrecorder technologies to preserve dynamic scholarly content.
- We have improved the discoverability of the 53 journals that CLOCKSS has triggered for Open Access, by exposing the metadata in KBART and other formats.
- CLOCKSS has partnered with Lyrasis to develop increased engagement with and support from North American library consortia. We will build on this initiative to do the same with non-North American library consortia.
- We launched a new and improved clockss.org website, which is already delivering an increased influx of inquiries from new publishers and libraries.
- The LOCKSS team at Stanford is finishing a major re-architecture of the software, to be launched as LOCKSS 2.0. The updated software will provide a foundation for more flexible content ingest, improved content management, and better scalability for the CLOCKSS Archive.
Our revenues in 2018 were stable, and we made a small surplus. With over $1 million in the bank, the CLOCKSS Archive continues to be financially secure.
In 2019 we are building on our stronger base, to maintain the increased pace of content ingest, to continuously improve the service that we provide to libraries and publishers, and to consider new strategic preservation initiatives that may be of value to our community.
We are proud of our community governance, with an active Board of Directors comprised equally by 24 leading libraries and publishers (https://clockss.org/community/board-of-directors/). We continue to believe that the open source LOCKSS software is the leading preservation technology for scholarly content, with our globally distributed network of servers at top-flight libraries (https://clockss.org/archive-nodes). And we remain committed to ensuring the long-term availability of scholarly content for end-users, working in close collaboration with libraries and publishers.