CLOCKSS, A Trusted Community-Run Archive, Debuts at ALA

["Amy Kohrman" <akohrman@stanford.edu>]

**With Apologies for Cross-Posting**

The founding members of the CLOCKSS pilot program are pleased to
announce that CLOCKSS will advance to active operations.  Two
years ago, scholarly publishers and research libraries,
challenged by the responsibility to preserve the digital assets
of the community, joined forces to build a prototype for a global
dark archive.  Their unique collaboration focused on creating an
archive "cooperative" with publishers and libraries running the
archive together.  The prototype was successfully built and
tested, and the need for a robust governing structure was
addressed.

One of the CLOCKSS board's first resolutions was that any content
released from the archive would be made available for free to the
world, without need of a subscription.  Content stored in CLOCKSS
cannot be accessed by anyone until a trigger event is deemed to
have occurred and the CLOCKSS board votes to "light up" the
affected titles and restore access to them again.

Utilizing open source LOCKSS (for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)
technology, the CLOCKSS archive comprises
geographically-dispersed nodes located at major research
libraries into which e-content is routinely ingested and
preserved.  Within the past year, CLOCKSS experienced two trigger
events and responded by releasing the endangered content at
CLOCKSS host organizations.

A unanimous vote by the CLOCKSS board in April 2008 led to the
decision to transition the archive from prototype to production.
With commitment from Elsevier, Wiley, Nature Publishing Group,
American Physiological Society, Taylor & Francis, bepress, and
other premier publishers to deposit their titles, and from
libraries across the world to act as archive nodes, CLOCKSS is
currently incorporating as a not-for-profit organization, and
will begin operations soon thereafter.

CLOCKSS was unveiled at a June ALA event honoring Victoria Reich,
Stanford University Libraries, this year's recipient of the ALCTS
Ulrich's Serials Librarian of the Year award, in part, for her
work with CLOCKSS.  Libraries and publishers worldwide are
invited to help build, guide, and govern CLOCKSS.

"Securely archiving our digital content is key to the future of
scientific communication," explains CLOCKSS founding member,
Howard Ratner, Chief Technology Officer, Nature Publishing Group.
"The joint efforts of the participating libraries and publishers
have made CLOCKSS an essential part of the fabric of digital
archiving.  CLOCKSS offers a proven secure dark archive and
hosting system for triggered content.  CrossRef and CLOCKSS
worked closely to make sure that users can access triggered
archived content via the DOI system. This is just one example of
how CLOCKSS is already helping to shape industry practices."

Pilot Participants:

Publishers include American Chemical Society, American Medical
Association, American Physiological Society, Elsevier, IOP
Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press,
SAGE Publications, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and
Wiley-Blackwell.

Library organizations include Indiana University, New York Public
Library, OCLC, Rice University, Stanford University, University
of Edinburgh, and University of Virginia.

The CLOCKSS pilot was funded by participating publishers and
library organizations, as well as by a grant from the National
Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
(NDIIPP) via the US Library of Congress.

************************************************************
For information on the CLOCKSS Initiative, please visit
http://www.clockss.org.

June 30, 2008
CLOCKSS
1450 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, California USA
650.721.5838
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