If you haven't already seen it for yourself, you may have read it in the news recently: in general, preservation of scholarly literature published in journals has not been a priority, and over time, research articles published in online scholarly journals have been and continue to be vulnerable to loss for a number of reasons related to the business and technology infrastructure of scholarly publishing.

From Chemistry World: A key chemistry journal disappeared from the web. Others are at risk

Eve, M. P., (2024) “Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles”, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 12(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288

Wild, S. (2024). Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the internet. Nature (London), 627(8003), 256. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00616-5 or via VIU Library: https://go.exlibris.link/FYbTd0XF

Everybody thinks of the immediate gains they might get from having a paper out somewhere, but we really should be thinking about the long-term sustainability of the research ecosystem,” Eve says. “After you’ve been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you’ve worked on?

For researchers and authors, this means that in addition to many other factors in selecting a publisher, it may be prudent to consider whether a publisher of choice has a long term preservation plan. Authors may also take individual actions to ensure that versions of their work may survive if a journal ceases publication or a publisher goes down -- this includes negotiating to retain author rights, and applying those rights to contribute open access versions of publications to an institutional repository such as VIUSpace, or a disciplinary repository such as Arxiv or Humanities Commons CORE.

In addition to offering the VIUSpace repository, VIU Library supports digital preservation services CLOCKSS and Portico, which provide access to content from participating publishers, that would otherwise disappear from the Web.