Ross Mounce

The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now
since the subscription access journal *Heterocycles* (e-ISSN:
[1881-0942](https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1881-0942)) was taken
offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a
["key"](https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-key-chemistry-journal-disappeared-from-the-web-others-are-at-risk/4019265.article)
journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been
cited at least 164,000 times.

The journal is preserved in the [CLOCKSS](https://clockss.org/) archive.

According to the CLOCKSS [standard participating
agreement](https://clockss.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CLOCKSS-Participating-Publisher-Agreement-2024.pdf),
the CLOCKSS Board will release archived content if the archived content
is determined in good faith by the Board "...to be unavailable from any
publisher for at least six consecutive months."

A calendar month may contain** 28 to 31 calendar days**, the average is
30.437. If we are generous and assume 30.437 days, then the "six months"
referred to in CLOCKSS agreement translates into 182.622 calendar days.
193 days is greater than 182 days and so I am puzzled as to why CLOCKSS
have chosen not to publicly release *Heterocycles* yet. Who are CLOCKSS
serving and who's interests do they represent?

My first question to CLOCKSS and the CLOCKSS board is therefore -- why
was the journal not released after e.g. 183 days of being continuously
unavailable?

I contacted a current board member of CLOCKSS after 181 days of
unavailability (2024-05-30) and was told that the CLOCKSS board had not
yet been briefed about *Heterocycles* at this point in time! Remarkable!
Where is the sense of urgency at CLOCKSS? My assertion here is that
every single day that the journal content remains offline creates harm
to the citation potential of the articles contained within the journal.
Causing harm to individuals (authors), research performing
organisations, and research funding organisations (at the least). The
content must be made available as soon as rules allow! Any delay in
excess of 182 days is a political choice made by CLOCKSS to go beyond
the minimum period stated in the contract (and six months is way way too
long in my opinion). CLOCKSS needs to be held accountable for this
choice to delay the release of the 17,000+ *Heterocycles* journal
articles, some of which were only published recently, right up into
2023!

I am rather worried about the current governance setup of CLOCKSS -- the
[CLOCKSS
board](https://clockss.org/digital-archive-community/board-of-directors/)
is rather narrowly composed of just publishers and librarians. Who is
there to represent the interests of authors who have published in these
journals? Who is there to represent the interests of patients who have
been experimented on, and the results of those experiments published in
journals archived in CLOCKSS? \[There are medical journals archived in
CLOCKSS\]. Who is there to represent the interests of charities &
taxpayers who by some estimates fund approximately 80% of academic
research?

Rather than just point the finger, I have offered to join the CLOCKSS
board to see if I can add some ideas from within.

CLOCKSS make a lot of use of the word "community" on their website, but
I infer they define their community as exclusively just publishers and
librarians. I note that Chris Hartgerink has written a great post
recently about how the term ["community" has been
co-opted](https://www.chjh.nl/community-is-the-new-family/). I
fundamentally disagree that publishers and librarians are the *only*
stakeholders in published scholarship. I see scholarship as a global
public good. This is also [the position of the International Science
Council](https://council.science/current/news/science-as-a-global-public-good/)
and others. I really think there needs to be a wider selection of people
involved in the governance & decision-making at CLOCKSS.

**Licensing**

Clause 4E of the CLOCKSS standard participating agreement is also a bit
vague: "Released Content use terms and restrictions will be determined
by an accompanying Creative Commons license (or equivalent license)
chosen either by Publisher or, if Publisher fails to respond within
thirty (30) days following receipt by it of the notice described above,
by the CLOCKSS Board."  
  
When CLOCKSS finally gets around to releasing *Heterocycles* from
darkness, which exact Creative Commons licence will the CLOCKSS Board
choose? OASPA and many other organisations [recommend CC
BY](https://www.oaspa.org/news/why-cc-by/). If the CLOCKSS Board chooses
CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND, or CC BY-NC-ND it would hamper re-use
of the journal content in important Wikimedia projects such as
[Wikimedia
Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing).

**CLOCKSS provides access, not just preservation**

If and when CLOCKSS does release *Heterocycles*, it will more than
double the current number of articles that CLOCKSS provides access to,
which is merely \~13,000 articles at the moment. CLOCKSS will
increasingly become a publication platform that provides access to
research that people want & need to read. CLOCKSS is not just a digital
preservation service -- it is an access provider too. I wonder if
CLOCKSS has forgotten about the access part? I look forward to the day
when CLOCKSS finally decides to publicly release *Heterocycles* to the
world, but as of this moment, I regret to say I am still waiting and it
is unclear why there is such a delay beyond the 182 day minimum...


The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now since the subscription access journal
<em>
 Heterocycles
</em>
(e-ISSN: 1881-0942) was taken offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a “key” journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been cited at least 164,000 times. The journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.

Time to update the CLOCKSS?

[UPDATE 2024-06-11 posted
here](https://rossmounce.co.uk/2024/06/11/time-to-update-the-clockss/).

At the time of writing this (2024-04-11), the entire content of a "key"
chemistry journal called *Heterocycles*, with over 17,000 articles in
it, from 1973 to 2023, has been knocked offline due to what the
publisher vaguely describes as "various circumstances".

The journal has been unavailable to access online since December 2023,
which means the content has been offline for four or five months now!
Dalmeet Singh Chawla (2024) has written an excellent piece about this
debacle for the magazine *Chemistry World*. I'd recommend you [read
it](https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-key-chemistry-journal-disappeared-from-the-web-others-are-at-risk/4019265.article)
before coming back to read my post here.

The good news is the content isn't completely lost. A not-for-profit
organisation supposedly dedicated to digital preservation of scholarly
content, called CLOCKSS ought to have a copy of every single digital
article that has been published in *Heterocycles*. However, recent
research by Martin P. Eve (2024) demonstrates that whilst dark archives
like CLOCKSS preserve journal content at a title-level, when this is
checked at an *article-level* it can be observed that actual digital
preservation of journals at the article-level by a dark archive can be
patchy.

Thanks to the accompanying website for Eve's (2024) article, we can
examine the [exact article-level preservation
status](https://the-vault.fly.dev/Member_Data?members=2364+%28The+Japan+Institute+of+Heterocyclic+Chemistry%29)
of a sample of a thousand articles from *Heterocycles*. All of Eve's
sample for *Heterocycles* are either "preserved" in CLOCKSS or
"preserved (in progress)" at CLOCKSS. Eve's work also reveals that
incomplete / patchy selections of *Heterocycles* articles are preserved
at HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and OCUL Scholars Portal.

So, I hope CLOCKSS does have a complete digital copy of the journal, but
the question is: will CLOCKSS make it available? This all depends on
CLOCKSS assessment of whether a "trigger event" has occurred here. From
the information given on the CLOCKSS website it seems that the
definition of a trigger event is quite open to interpretation. If a
title is no longer offered (online), the publisher is no longer
providing access to the content AND there are no successor interests or
reversion or transfer of rights then (and only then) CLOCKSS will make
their copies available online for all to read. From what the executive
director of CLOCKSS says in the *Chemistry World* interview, it seems
CLOCKSS are choosing to wait for the publisher of *Heterocycles* to find
a successor. Alicia Wise is quoted as saying: "we will be in a position
to make it available should they not find a successor organisation to
look after it".

**Ethical Dilemma**

Herein lies the ethical dilemma... how long should CLOCKSS wait for the
publisher of *Heterocycles* to find a business successor? Over 17,000
journal articles have been offline for over 4 months now. CLOCKSS cannot
and should not wait forever -- it is not ethical to wait for too long --
it would be unfair on all the authors of the content, the research
funders of the content, and the readers who need to read what is
published in it.

I am troubled by the lack of transparency in CLOCKSS decision making
here -- who decides how long CLOCKSS should wait for business
successors, before declaring a trigger event? I am concerned about
possible conflicts of interest that might creep in here too, for
instance *Heterocycles* has a longstanding relationship with Elsevier.
Elsevier were the official distributor of *Heterocycles* in all
countries of the world, except for Japan
([source](https://web.archive.org/web/20160421042352/http://www.journals.elsevier.com/heterocycles)).
In my view Elsevier could conceivably be a prime candidate as a
'business successor' to take over *Heterocycles* and extract rent from
it, for profit. The current executive director of CLOCKSS is Alicia Wise
who is well known for her time in employment at Elsevier as its
"[Director of Universal
Access](https://serials.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/24115)". Any extra
delay in declaring this a "trigger event" at CLOCKSS could be construed
as buying time for a business deal to arrange a successor.  
  
My personal feeling here is that 4 months is plenty of time. CLOCKSS
current policy seems to prioritise the needs of businesses and business
interests. The needs of authors, readers, research funders and research
institutions are ignored.

Put yourself in the shoes of an author of a recent article, published at
*Heterocycles*: you've spent 2 years doing some research, got it through
peer review, it's published in *Heterocycles* in 2023 and now the
journal is completely offline and no-one (even loyal, paying-subscriber
institutions) can access / read / cite the digital version of your
article 🙃

And CLOCKSS just sits there and just says 'well we *could* provide
digital access to the articles', but we won't because of business
interests... I would be hopping mad!

For instance: "Synthesis of Arylideneisoxazol-5-ones Catalyzed by Sodium
Cyclamate" authored by Ziba Daroughezadeh and Hamzeh Kiyani and
published in *Heterocycles* in 2023,  pp. 1187-1197, with the DOI:
[10.3987/com-23-14859](https://doi.org/10.3987/com-23-14859) . Won't
this clearly cause harm to the citation potential of this work if people
can't access the digital copy? If you can't read it, you can't cite it.

I know that some libraries hold print runs of *Heterocycles*,
[WorldCat](https://search.worldcat.org/title/866106914) data (if
reliable) says that UCL and Leiden have print copies but most
universities around the world definitely do not have print copies of
this journal.

**Conclusions**

Over 17,000 research articles have been knocked offline for over 4
months and CLOCKSS is for the moment choosing not to classify this as a
"trigger event".

I think research funders, researchers, and research institutions need to
look very closely at this and reconsider how they publish research --
the old way seems to prioritize business interests over the needs of the
research community. As I have argued before (Mounce, 2023),
openly-licensed journal publication provides the resilience we need when
journal publishing businesses fail, for whatever reason. "All rights
reserved" content, published behind a paywall with a subscription like
*Heterocycles* creates a lot of headaches and heartaches when they fail.

**References**

Dalmeet Singh Chawla (9th April 2024) "A key chemistry journal
disappeared from the web. Others are at risk" *Chemistry World*.
Available at:
<https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-key-chemistry-journal-disappeared-from-the-web-others-are-at-risk/4019265.article>

Eve, M. P., (2024) "Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A
Study of 7 Million Articles", *Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly
Communication* 12(1). doi: <https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288>

Mounce, R. (2023). Resilience: another advantage of openly-licensed
content. *A Blog by Ross Mounce*. <https://doi.org/10.59350/psmbr-f6p84>


UPDATE 2024-06-11 posted here.  At the time of writing this (2024-04-11), the entire content of a “key” chemistry journal called
<em>
 Heterocycles
</em>
, with over 17,000 articles in it, from 1973 to 2023, has been knocked offline due to what the publisher vaguely describes as “various circumstances”.  The journal has been unavailable to access online since December 2023, which means the content has been offline for four or five months now!

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Time to update the CLOCKSS?

Things we can learn from the ongoing Heterocycles debacle