Preserving Innovation: Ensuring the Future of Today’s Scholarship

Scholars are experimenting with increasingly diverse digital technologies to express their research in new ways. Publishers, in turn, are working to support complex, dynamic, born-digital publications that can no longer be represented in print. New forms of scholarship contain enhancements such as embedded media and viewers, data visualizations, different approaches to version management, complex interdependent networks of supporting materials such as software and data, reader-contributed content (annotations, comments), interactive features, and nonlinear forms of navigation. These features can create challenges for the long-term sustainability of the publication – without planning for longevity the most innovative scholarship today may lose the characteristics that make them unique or become expensive to maintain. These challenges are magnified for preservation services that aim to ensure the publications will be available for future scholars. It is in this context that NYU Libraries initiated a project to bring together preservation services that focus on scholarly content with publishers concerned about the long-term survival of their most innovative publications. By analyzing examples of dynamic and enhanced open access monographs, the preservation services determined what could be preserved at scale using current tools. From this the team produced a set of guidelines that those involved in creating and publishing content could use to make these new forms of publications more preservable. The project was also an opportunity to start a conversation between preservation services and publishers about ways to collaborate around the shared goal of perpetuating access to unique and often costly publications.