Re: vanishing act

[Office of The Provost <provost@georgetown.edu>]

The discussion over publisher-removed articles is of course a discussion
over the reliability of archives.  We are accustomed to being able to go
back to published material long after the fact and to find a stable and
accurate record of what was said.  Traditionally, libraries have been the
guarantors of this process:  preserving many copies, with no legal
liability for the content (or at least less than the publisher might
have), and with an institutional commitment to permanence and
preservation.  The "vanishing act" discussion highlights a feature of
unreliability of e-archives that depends (1) on the physical malleability
of the record and (2) on the slightly lower commitment to full
preservation that a publisher might have.  It is disturbing, because it is
the tip of the iceberg, I think:  if for fairly transient reasons,
publishers will pull articles, when might not publishers prove unreliable
for other reasons?

But the question that follows on this discussion for me is this:  If we
were to ask that not publishers but authors be the guarantors of
permanence, self-publishing or publishing in institutional repositories
where the author retains control over the copyright and disposition of
his/her material -- what protection do we then have to assure us that
articles will remain archived, unchanged, in perpetuity?  Are there
articles I have written that I wouldn't mind disappearing?  Actually, yes.  
Are there pieces of articles that I would quietly change if I could?  
Well, interesting thought, sure.

Is it important that the record abide?  Then should not all discussions of
e-publishing for scholarly purposes include a discussion of preservation
that includes not only the physical vulnerability of the media but their
psychosocial vulnerability?  What guarantors other than libraries do we
realistically have?

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown University