Is the electronic journal archive secure?

There was a time, not so long ago, when "printed journal" was a tautology. All journals existed only in printed form. Since the early 1990s we have been grappling with the birth and growth of the electronic journal, now an unruly teenager. Just like other teenagers, the electronic journal has had a disruptive effect.

For centuries libraries and publishers have had stable roles: publishers produced information; libraries provided access to this information and kept it for ever. We knew that once we had purchased a subscription to a journal we just had to provide shelf space for it and it would be there when we (you) needed it. If there was a problem we knew that plenty of other libraries would also have copies and could help out.

In the electronic era this is all changed. We no longer purchase journals, we can only licence electronic access from the publisher, and we have to look very carefully at the terms and conditions of any licence we sign. When a journal changes publisher we may lose our rights to content that we thought was securely ours. However, the biggest worry has been the future - will the journals still be available in 10, 20, 50 years' time? Are the publishers, upon whom we rely for access, willing and able to take on the archival function that has for so long been the role of libraries?

Librarians have been asking this question for several years, with increasing insistence as online access has become dominant. There are now quite a number of answers emerging. As yet it is not clear which (if any) approach will be most effective. The leading contenders are outlined below.

National libraries have begun to tackle the problem. The British Library has a project with 200 journal publishers, and both the Dutch and Australian national libraries are archiving journals publsihed in their territories. The Dutch Library also offers services for some major global publishers. The US National Library of Medicine's PubMedCentral service archives about 220 journals from 40 publishers.

Some initiatives have come from the research library community, mainly originating in US university libraries. LOCKSS wins the prize for the worst acronym (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) but has a simple concept, viz that libraries use a variety of web-crawling software to make copies of journals they subscribe to, and then share these copies with a network of other libraries. This ensures that content a library subscribes to is almost always available regardless of any problems at the the publisher. More than 80 libraries are now using LOCKSS. Unfortunately large publishers are not so keen to cooperate with this project as it takes too much control away from the publisher. CLOCKSS (Community LOCKSS) is a project bringing together six libraries and twelve major publishers to establish a dark archive*.

Portico is a third-party archiving service with support from a number of major US library players and funders. Portico tries to preserve the intellectual content of the electronic journal as completely as possible. It preserves publishers' source files in addition to converting them to a recognised archival format. Again it is a dark archive. This initiative seems to be one of the better thought-out solutions to the problem, finding favour with publishers and libraries. The downside is that it will have an attached cost - participating publishers and libraries will need to contribute to its costs.

* Dark Archive. The purpose of a dark archive is to function as a repository for information that can be used as a failsafe during disaster recovery, or for preservation purposes, but it is not used for daily patron access. It is necessary to specify what trigger events will cause the dark archive to be made "light", i.e. acccessible.