4 October 2021
Project JASPER (JournAlS are Preserved forevER) is an initiative to preserve open access journals. It was launched on World Preservation Day 2020 and is in response to research that shows that online journals—both open and closed access journals—can just disappear from the internet. This happens because of a lack of awareness amongst smaller publishers around the need for long-term digital preservation and/or the resources to enroll a journal in a long-term digital preservation scheme.
Long-term archiving of research resources is of paramount importance for scholarship. Authors want to ensure their contributions to the scholarly record will be permanent. Scholars must be able to access all of the published research in their fields, both now and long into the future.
As a scholarly community, we are pledged to eliminate the possibility that high-value resources can disappear. Project JASPER aims to close the gap in preservation coverage that currently exists among open access journals.
Phase One of Project JASPER is a pilot project between CLOCKSS, DOAJ, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry and PKP. It is a scoping exercise aiming to find a solution that will reduce the number of unarchived open access journals.
Starting with a list of diamond open access (i.e. non-APC charging) journals from DOAJ, the five partners are working together to produce an open and sustainable process that will facilitate the archiving of more journals. The process will be open to a diverse community of archiving services, notably those participating in the Keepers Registry. Other “Keepers” and other preservation repositories will be invited to join at a later stage once design, implementation, and testing are complete.
JASPER’s aim is to get more journals archived by establishing a simple process:
- work out which archiving option might be the best fit for the publisher,
- establish the level where the amount of effort is manageable by the publisher. This is based on the following factors:
- platform
- ability to send article metadata to DOAJ
- ability to export and zip full text, images etc easily
- provide the journal’s representatives with the correct information to make archiving happen.
The premise of the JASPER process is that all journals are different, with different needs, different priorities and different resources. The workflow needs to offer viable alternatives to journals so that they engage with one or more archiving services that meet their requirements and capacities.