Long Term Archiving and PeerJ - PeerJ Blog

"Now that PeerJ is fully open for submissions we thought that readers might be interested in learning about some of the work that went on behind the scenes to get us here. This is the third in a series of three blog posts which describe some of the groups we have been working with, or expect to work with, as we move forwards. Effective Long Term Archiving of the scholarly literature is extremely important. Scholarly journal articles are some of the most intellectually valuable content that our society produces and so they should be appropriately protected.  From the collapse of civilization, down to deliberate alterations of the scholarly record, it is very important that this knowledge it preserved, protected, and propagated forwards in time. These days, most journal content is distributed electronically (as opposed to via print) and so it is vitally important that an online ‘immutable version of record’ is maintained, to which readers can expect that the content has not changed since original publication, and that copies will remain accessible for future researchers. In addition of course, much of the content published today actually cannot be reproduced in print anyway (e.g. multimedia elements, or large supplemental files). Clearly this is not a trivial problem, but fortunately there are several industry standard solutions for the long term preservation and archiving of the literature. Obviously we have our own local backups, as well as storage at Amazon (which will also be made available as an open data mining resource in the future), but in addition we will make use of PubMed Central and CLOCKSS to ensure the ‘industry standard’ archiving of our content ..."