Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their
entire life-cycle and over time for current and future generations of
users' (Digital Curation Centre, undated) is a huge problem and likely
to be an extremely expensive one to solve. You can preserve a digital
object, but it is much less useful if you do not know what or where it is,
and it is utterly useless if you do not have the hardware and software
needed to read it.
A number of initiatives have emerged, including those of private
organizations (the best known examples are Portico and LOCKSS) and
of national deposit libraries (for example e-Depot from the Koninklijke
Bibliotheek), but the problem has not been solved yet and, although
the role that publishers have to play in digital curation is an open
question, the solution will require the commitment and involvement of
all stakeholders.
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A particular issue in scholarly publishing is the preservation of
material produced by the plethora of very small publishers that
characterizes the scholarly publishing landscape. These organizations
are the least likely to interact with formal archiving schemes and yet,
because of their small size and often fragile finances, are probably
producing the content that is most at risk.
Version control
The role of the journal as the archive is arguably being eroded; or at
least, the online-only journal gives us the facility for a journal article to
become a living, changing thing which can be corrected, updated and
enhanced.
In addition, the ease with which material can be posted to the world
wide web means that a variety of different versions appear, ranging
from the Author's Original manuscript, through various intermediate
versions produced by either the author or the publisher, to the Version
of Record. The issue of version control is therefore a serious one.
It is vital that the scholarly journal literature is well defined.
Currently, articles appearing in a journal are, in a sense, fixed in time,
with the publisher taking responsibility for them and for making
available a definitive version, the Version of Record; and while errata,
corrigenda and addenda may be published subsequently, the Version of
Record itself does not change. There can only be one version of the
