ATG Interviews Alicia Wise, Executive Director of CLOCKSS - Charleston Hub

"ATG:  When you accepted the position, you remarked that CLOCKSS was “a profoundly important service.”  For those unfamiliar with CLOCKSS and its mission, can you tell us why it’s so important?  What essential services does CLOCKSS offer to those in the world of scholarly communications?  Is there anything unique about those services? AW:  The mission of the CLOCKSS archive is to ensure the scholarly record remains available for humanity.  Scholars have worked so hard to advance knowledge, and their hard work is important to us all and especially to those scholars who will build on this foundation in the future.  Digital preservation is too big a job for any single organization, and even were it possible, it’s too important a job to entrust to any single organization, and so the community approach of CLOCKSS along with, and more broadly, LOCKSS is inspiring. At CLOCKSS we focus on electronic publications.  Initially this meant books and journals, but now it means books, journals, and much more.  We are preserving all the rich resources that underpin articles and books (think data, protocols, software, visualizations), and entirely new forms of scholarship too (think scholar-led, interactive humanities resources published by academics or libraries). CLOCKSS is a dark archive which means the content entrusted to us is made accessible only after the original or successor creators and publishers are no longer able to look after it.  When CLOCKSS provides access to the content, it becomes open access to everyone in perpetuity. ..."