Protecting Science: TIB builds Dark Archive for arXiv - TIB-Blog

"What we [German National Library of Science and Technology, or Technische Informationsbibliothek, TIB] have implemented over the last few weeks, is to build a Dark Archive of arXiv contents:

As a first step in building a Dark Archive, the rights clearance needs to be addressed, of course. Here, TIB had already commissioned a legal advisory survey back in 2016, in the context of a possible cooperation with arXiv.org. This included studying the licences used by arXiv, which broadly fall into the categories “arXiv.org licence” , “Creative Commons“, and “Public Domain“.

While nothing stands in the way of archiving the data and metadata as such, the status of these rights would have to be explored in detail if they were to be made accessible in the context of a public-facing service. This is especially relevant for resources under arXiv licences, since this licence type over the course of the years underwent several versions. Between the years 1991 and 2003, users were even able to upload data objects without explicitly stating a licence....

The data are being stored, but if push comes to shove it would need some more steps to make them publicly available."