Crossref DOIs, persistent discovery, and the digital preservation of 7.5 million items

Preservation organisations have reacted with alarm to a recent analysis that suggests around a quarter of academic publications are not being preserved for the future.

Martin Paul Eve of CrossRef assessed around 7.5 million ebooks and articles for which the organisation provides a fixed identifier, or Digital Object Identifier (DOI). For around two million articles in his study, he could find no evidence that the articles were being preserved. Librarians have been urged to play an important role in encouraging and requiring proper preservation. A toolkit to support librarians, including model license language, is available here: https://liblicense.crl.edu/resources/digital-preservation/. Martin Paul Eve also cited the Keepers Registry, a service hosted and managed by ISSN International Centre.