More Collaboration for Enduring Digital Scholarship

SUP is named as one of several collaborators in a new Mellon-funded initiative for digital content publishers and preservation services.

Stanford University Press, specifically its digital initiative, is joining with a handful of other digitally progressive scholarly publishers to test the capacity and potential of some well-known preservation services including CLOCKSS and Portico in a newly funded project to be led by NYU. The initiative, which has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, comes in response to the emerging needs of publishers whose content no longer fits the traditional molds and bounds of the print monograph, and the readers and researchers who will lose access to these valuable resources if they are not properly maintained in the scholarly record. The questions the group will face are many of the same ones we’ve been pursuing and reporting on here on the supDigital blog, and we’re eager to continue exploring solutions alongside other programs who share our challenges. The project is the culmination of conversations we’ve all been having with each other at publishing conferences and preservation workshops for many months, and it’s a chance to extend that conversation to the service providers who have been accommodating the more traditional preservation needs of publishers and researchers for years.

Read the April 17th press release »

While the content and technologies vary significantly between the participating publishers, with SUP’s consistently pushing the outer limits, we hope that by representing the extreme innovations authors are pursuing that we help inform a set of standards that ensures the progress scholars are making in digital formats doesn’t escape the longevity that traditional scholarship enjoys. We will continue to actively maintain and update our own technical guidelines and archiving pathways and are looking forward to contributing what we’ve learned and developed in that area to this new initiative. As invested as we as publishers are in advancing and disseminating scholarly argument, it’s exciting to see the durability of those arguments getting support as well.