On the 6^th and 7^th of June, EDINA and the ISSN International Centre hosted a second international workshop as part of the Jisc-supported Keepers Extra project.  

Following on from last September’s Taking the Long View: International Perspectives on E-Journal Archiving, the event provided an opportunity to discuss recent projects and developments in e-journal archiving and focused on exploring potential collaborative activity among the network of organisations reporting into the Keepers Registry. Delegates included representatives of the agencies reporting into the Keepers Registry and other key organisations such as the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Preservation Coalition and Research Libraries UK.

The workshop opened with a series of presentations, including overviews of the work of two new ‘Keepers’ who have recently begun reporting their data into the Registry: the Public Knowledge Project , which archives Open Access journals published on the OJS platform, and the Cariniana network, an initiative of  Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT).  These were followed by reports from the Keepers Extra project team, who presented the work that had been completed since the first workshop.

One of the main aims of the Keepers Extra project has been to explore the challenge of increasing the archival and preservation coverage of scholarly journals, with a focus on tackling the ‘long tail’ of small publishers.  At the first workshop, it was established that the key barriers to increasing coverage were lack of resources, particularly around publisher participation negotiations and technical set up. In discussion with the agencies, the Keepers Extra project team drew up a series of proposed activities to address these barriers, and then tested the viability of the proposals through a series of consultations. The team found that while archiving agencies themselves often had quite divergent approaches and missions, there were a number of shared challenges around working with other stakeholders, such as publishers and libraries.

Outcomes

The workshop affirmed the value of the Keepers Registry as a tool and locus of community activity and the enthusiasm for knowledge sharing and collaboration which has been evident throughout the Keepers Extra project . The value of coming together to discuss shared challenges was evident, and it was agreed that the group might effectively speak as one on several issues.  Over the next months, a small working group has agreed to collaboratively craft a shared statement, setting out the importance of the Keepers Registry as a community hub, highlighting the progress made in e-journal archiving, and setting out actions now required. It was agreed that regular meetings of the network around the Registry would be useful, and a series of provisional dates were proposed.

Keepers Extra Workshop, University of London Institute in Paris, June 7th 2016