TIB cooperates as Keeper with the ISSN International Centre

NISO Member News

Paris, France. |. January 8, 2024

Electronic journals – also known as e-journals – have become commonplace and indispensable in many scientific disciplines. The transition to e-journals has contributed to a faster exchange of information among scientists. In the case of Open Access (OA) e-journals, the content is even freely and unrestrictedly available online to all researchers and the general public.

It is important that these e-journals be available in perpetuity. In addition to the usual problems associated with digital preservation, publishers themselves pose a risk in the context of long-term access to e-journals. For example, the risks of discontinued access to titles via the publishers' platforms, or even the complete closure of a publisher, need to be considered. Digital preservation at the TIB enables the data to be used and read for many years to come: its task is to recognize and understand the characteristics of the various digital formats and to develop strategies for their survival.

The TIB's digital holdings of e-journals currently include approximately 2,500 journal titles, including Wiley e-journals under the DEAL-Wiley agreement (https://www.tib.eu/en/tib/news-and-events/news/details/open-access-im-normalmodus-der-deal-wiley-vertrag-tritt-zum-1-juli-in-kraft0) and Ukrainian Open Access journals (https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/2023/09/19/electronic-preservation-project-for-ukrainian-open-access-journals-epp-ua-to-safeguard-research-content-during-the-war), which are harvested by the TIB.

The TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library is now the 18th institution worldwide and the second in Germany to cooperate with the ISSN International Centre (https://www.issn.org). In future, all e-journals held by the TIB will be listed in the Keepers Registry (https://keepers.issn.org).

Journals can be searched on this platform by their ISSN, their unique persistent identifier. This identifier enables libraries, repositories and archives to find out whether a particular issue of a journal has already been archived and who the ”keeper” of the journal is. In addition to the TIB, the ”keeper” are the e-journal archiving services Portico, CLOCKSS and global LOCKSS, as well as institutions such as the Library of Congress, the National Library of France, the National Library of the Netherlands, the National Digital Preservation Program China and the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.

”Having already used the Keepers portal as a research tool for years, we are now delighted to become a Keeper ourselves and to use this way to make our wide-ranging activities in digital preservation visible both nationally and internationally,” explains Micky Lindlar, Team Leader Digital Preservation at the TIB.

”Keepers offers the unique opportunity to make long-term archived holdings visible across institutions. This allows the identification of archival gaps, which is particularly important for the national task of ’dark archive’ archiving taken on by the TIB for the DEAL consortium,” says Thomas Bähr, Head of Preservation and Long-Term Archiving at the TIB.

The TIB itself has been using the Keepers Registry for many years to compare the archival status of different e-journals and to make informed decisions about which journals in the TIB collection should be prioritized for digital preservation. 

“The ISSN International Centre is proud to have the TIB join Keepers Registry. The participation of archiving agencies based in Europe is welcome and strengthens the diversity of the journal titles preserved. In the future, we hope to develop the contribution of agencies based in Africa, Asia and Oceania,” adds Gaelle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre.