Open Access Journal Archiving and How To Do It Effectively
We are now well-versed with the journal production process and its publishing mechanism. When you think of the scholarly publishing lifecycle, typesetting manuscripts (in machine-readable formats) and disseminating content across search engines are its core functions.
But what really happens once you publish your research work or a journal? How do you preserve your journal content so that your readers can always access it regardless of time (publishing date), location, and storage format (JATS XML, ePUB, HTML, PDF, etc.).
With more and more journals going digital and publishers embracing open access publishing approaches, the need for storing, preserving, and depositing content in digital repositories is now more than ever. All these are tied back to the process of archiving journals and research articles.
This blog will help you gain a deeper understanding of e-archiving and get started with archival methods for your open access journals.
The Importance of Archiving a Journal and Scholarly Articles
Although digital publishing has its own set of advantages, the sad reality about published content is that its long-term accessibility is not guaranteed. Permanent digital preservation of open access journals and scholarly research becomes a concern when no permanent article identifiers are assigned to the articles or they have not been archived in archival databases.
A study by Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn on the phenomenon of vanished journals found, “174 OA journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world.”
The study highlights the fact that published journals or research outputs openly accessible are vulnerable to getting potentially lost forever. Therefore, archiving all your open-access content across digital libraries and repositories is critical for retaining long-term value.
Benefits of e-Archiving Open Access Journals
The impact you can create by archiving your OA journal articles are:
- Long-term availability and accessibility of research work to relevant audience and readers
- It helps minimize or eliminate the risk of digital decay of valuable information by preserving content for a very long time.
- In the event of a disaster, data retrieval from archive storage is easy. You can recover archived copies of your journals and make them accessible to the public if the original output gets lost or is removed from a publication.
- The more archives you join and submit your scholarly articles to, the higher the chances of your journal discovery and visibility.
Types of Archives — Journal Archival Methods
There are three different options for archiving your open access journals — dark archives, openly accessible archives, and dim archives. Let’s explore this spectrum of archives:
1. Dark Archive — A dark archive is private, digital archive storage that is not accessible to the public (online readers). Dark archives serve as failsafe repositories for storing and preserving published journal articles.
Think of a dark archive as a secret place where all scholarly research is securely deposited, and the content is only made available to the public post a “trigger event.” This “trigger event” arises in case a journal no longer exists in a publication or a publication is discontinued.
It is a long-term and sustainable archival method that you can use to future-proof your open access journals. Some of the popular and commonly used dark archives are CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, Portico, etc.
2. Light or Public Archive — Also known as Open Archive, a light archive is publicly and openly accessible to all digital readers. Public archives provide you various options for storing your scholarly articles, including institutional or university-run libraries, pre-print servers, open archive databases, and more.
Internet Archive Scholar, PubMed Central (PMC), SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Contexts), Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Deep Blue, and arXiv are some of the leading public/open archives.
3. Dim Archive — It is a consolidated model of Dark and Light Archive models. As this type of digital archive incorporates accessibility elements of both the dark and open archives, the access to some scholarly content is restricted to certain organizational custodians but is available to others, typically to a research community with a large readership.
Dim Archives cannot be accessed by all internet users but can be released publicly if required or requested. The archival method is generally used when a journal needs to be preserved with limited access.
Best Practices for Archiving OA Journals
For digital preservation and persistence of published scholarly content, you should follow some best practices for archiving the research work effectively.
Let’s delve into the top three best practices every author and publisher should consider:
1. Make the world knowledgeable and a better place with “Self-Archiving”
Self-archiving is a method of depositing journal articles, theses, dissertations, etc., to a personal journal repository or an organization-led archive. Individual authors and researchers commonly practice this open-access archiving strategy to make their research work openly available on the internet.
There are various institutional repositories and disciplinary archives such as PubMed Central, arXiv, CORE, SSRN, etc., where authors can contribute/self-archive their papers. CogPrints — Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archives is also an e-archive used for self-archiving research papers in several academic disciplines.
Advantages of self-archiving journals:
- Extending the scientific knowledge to large sets of audiences and expanding your open-access journal’s outreach
- A cost-free method that boosts the visibility, impact factor, citation count, and downloads of open-access journals
- Usually, journal deposition in well-known archival organizations and agencies takes time to get approved. Self-archiving reduces that lag/processing time as authors have to self-file the articles to a publication archive. Once the articles are freely accessible, readers don’t have to raise access requests for the content.
- More importantly, it supports the openness criteria of research funders and helps you achieve Plan S compliance.
2. Get well-versed with archiving policies before article submission
If you are considering different archiving options, getting a clear understanding of each archiving agency’s policies and requirements is essential.
While e-archiving plays a significant role in the journal publication process, it is equally important that you deposit your research papers and articles typeset in a structured format that machines can read (e.g., search engines).
Many archives have certain guidelines and specific instructions for the creation of digital copies of your journal articles. To ensure that the content is processed and archived properly, article formatting policies are placed. Most archiving organizations require authors and publishers to deposit their works in JATS XML files with front-matter XML metadata (Digital Object Identifiers, journal title, ISSN, etc.). Some archives also make it mandatory to deposit full-text, machine-readable XML article files.
However, generating metadata-rich JATS XML files of your journal articles tends to get technical and tedious if done manually. To save your time, efforts, and cost invested in formatting these articles, you can leverage the SciSpace platform for automated JATS XML generation and conversion. You can easily convert and export your journal article into semantically tagged JATS XML files.
When you pay attention to the article formatting, rich metadata ingestion, and standardization (to avoid consistency issues in the paper) right at the beginning of journal article production, archiving process becomes more efficient.
3. Deposit your scholarly articles in designated, recognized e-archiving agencies
When preserving and storing your published works become an integral part of the journal management lifecycle, it is only fair to ask, “where can I archive my journal articles?”
Applying for and submitting open-access journals to well-known, recognized archiving organizations increases the credibility of your content. You should deposit your research papers in archives that have higher publishing standards and a larger audience base.
Designated archives such as PMC, DOAJ, and Internet Archive are trusted by scholars, publishers, and academic institutions, thus improving the reach and reputation of the journals archived in their storage.
In Conclusion:
Journal archiving has become one of the core functions in the journal publishing lifecycle. Digital archiving of scholarly content, journal articles, etc., ensures that your research work will be preserved and accessible to the readers in the long run.
Since there is no such concept as “forever,” you need to back up your research data and keep refreshing archive storage for the permanent availability of digital information.
In view of your interest in simplifying research workflows, we suggest you take a look at SciSpace. In a single portal, you can complete all your research writing tasks, including literature searches.
SciSpace provides researchers, universities, and publishers with all the tools they need. Our comprehensive research repository features more than 200 million research papers from multiple disciplines with SEO-optimized abstracts, a publicly visible profile to highlight your expertise, a specially-built collaborative text editor, 20,000+ journal templates, and more.
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