What if an open-access publisher goes bankrupt? « Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring

"In a comment on a recent Guardian piece (not mine, but a response to it), Peter Morgan asked:  'A separate concern is whether the OA business model is sustainable in the long term of decades or even centuries. By contract, OA content has almost no commercial value, unless it is re-published in a for-profit volume. How confident can we be that the content of an OA journal that goes bankrupt will be preserved in an openly accessible way?'  Don’t worry — you can be very confident. Reputable open-access journals arrange for their content to be archived in well-trusted third-party archives such as PubMed Central and CLOCKSS. See for example PeerJ’s blog about the arrangements they’re making or this statement from PLOS ONE. A much more serious problem is this: what happens to the content of a non-OA journal when it goes bankrupt? In general, copyright for the content of such journals is owned by the publisher. This not only means that informal archive arrangements such as BioTorrents and The Disks Of Millions can’t be used — worse, it means that content archived in PubMed Central or CLOCKSS may never become available. If a failing publisher sells its assets, that will include the copyrights — and since literally any unethical corporation might sniff an asset-stripping opportunity, that could be disastrous. In short, you can be much more confident that PLOS’s content will still be around in 10, 20 and 100 years than you can that Elsevier’s will."