Preserving Open Access digital resources

Abstract

There has been a remarkable growth of the use of e-resources, and especially of e-journals by researchers, in every field of studies. Ensuring the accessibility and use by future generations is an important challenge for university and research libraries. The paper is particularly dealing with the problems of digital preservation of relevant scientific documents issued according to the Open access movement. After examining the characteristics of the diffusion and citation impact of Open access papers in scientific literature, the paper highlights the need for all the research libraries to preserve digital contents published in OA, to ensure the access and use for future researchers. The KB e-Depot and DOAJ project for OA digital preservation is taken into consideration, and systems for digital archiving and for cooperative preservation of scholarly journals' contents: PORTICO, the LOCKSS Alliance and CLOCKSS, are presented.