6 December 2023
Two years ago, DOAJ announced it would take proactive steps to prevent open access journals from disappearing from the Internet. Two months later, Project JASPER was born.
JASPER is a cross-industry collaboration with one main goal: to help open access journals be preserved long-term. It sounds simple, but there are challenges. Lack of resources and understanding around why preservation is needed means that many journals aren’t ever preserved.
The JASPER partners—CLOCKSS, DOAJ, Internet Archive, The Keepers Registry, and Public Knowledge Project (PKP)—collaborated to build on existing trusted infrastructure and services. Journals indexed in DOAJ can apply to be included in a variety of long-term digital preservation services if they meet a range of selection criteria. Journals can choose one or more preservation routes: currently, Internet Archive, the PKP’s Preservation Network (PKP-PN), or CLOCKSS.
Some of the most vulnerable journals in DOAJ have been archived thanks to the partners’ commitment and belief in the value of the initiative. As Alicia Wise, Executive Director of CLOCKSS, explains: “The JASPER project aligns powerfully with the mission and values of the CLOCKSS community. We aim to work with libraries and publishers worldwide to ensure the long-term survival of scholarship for future generations. Our goal is to protect others’ content; it is not about any individual or about CLOCKSS but about preserving research and knowledge and making it accessible to all. We are committed to equality and diversity and seek to collaborate with partners in all regions of the world. And JASPER helps us to do all of this. Its ‘common good’ approach is doing what is in the best interest of the global scholarly community and the knowledge we work to preserve.” (Members of the CLOCKSS community can be found at https://clockss.org/digital-archive-community/)
“As part of its mandate to make knowledge public, PKP understands that preserving and maintaining long-term access to published content is critical, and JASPER is an outstanding project to ensure this happens”, says PKP Operations Director Kevin Stranack. To support this, PKP joined Project JASPER to ensure that OJS journals from across the globe had a path to preservation in addition to the PKP Preservation Network (https://pkp.sfu.ca/pkp-pn/)
“Participation in Project JASPER is an important part of Internet Archive’s broader effort for a collaborative approach to ensuring the preservation of, and persistent, universal access to, scholarly work,” says Jefferson Bailey, Director of Archiving & Data Services. “Project JASPER complements similar Internet Archive efforts bringing print open scholarship online, such as our work with MIT Press and Punctum Books, integration with Center for Open Science to preserve open science outputs, and the Internet Archive Scholar project, which has preserved over 130+ million open access articles and datasets from the public web, 25+ million of which are available for full-text search and are indexed in Google Scholar. Project JASPER helps give preservation infrastructure to non-profit, OA publishers that wouldn’t otherwise have the resources to do this work and helps ensure scholarship is available into the future via a coordinated, multi-custodial approach to preservation.”
A small but significant success
Since its launch two years ago, JASPER has solicited applications from around 100 journal editors, which led to just over 40 applications being submitted. Of the 32 journals selected, 29 chose to be preserved via CLOCKSS and Internet Archive, and three chose to have their OJS-based publications preserved in the PKP-PN. Fourteen of the 26 journals that chose CLOCKSS and Internet Archive are actively sending full-text content via a DOAJ-Internet Archive-CLOCKSS pipeline.