Time to update the CLOCKSS?

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) 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.

According to the CLOCKSS standard participating agreement, 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 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. 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 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. 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.

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…