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Long-Term Preservation of Open Access Publications: Facts, Current Practices, and Future Outlook

We are very pleased to welcome Mikael Laakso as the fourth speaker in our Open Divide series. On July 23, 2025, at 5 p.m. CEST, he will address the long-term preservation of open-access publications—highlighting risks, recent developments, and strategies for safeguarding both journals and books in the evolving scholarly communication landscape.

👉Abstract
In this talk I focus on long-term preservation of open-access publications, discussing challenges and best practices both resulting from insights of research I have been involved in myself as well as that produced by others. The diverse, distributed, and democratic nature of open access publishing is a richness but also puts pressure on existing infrastructures to comprehensively capture and preserve content before it is too late.

It has been about five years since we published the initial results of a paper titled “Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals” that highlighted the urgent need to improve the circumstances for long-term preservations of in particular open access journals. Important steps by different actors have been taken since then but there is still a substantial amount of published materials that are at risk of becoming unavailable unless continued efforts are made to make preservation options as accessible as possible and encourage journals to sign up to them.

For open access books the situation is much harder to gauge with certainty due to the different nature of metadata on books and their preservation information, but a recent study I conducted titled “Open access books through open data sources: Assessing prevalence, providers, and preservation” sheds light on some of the main challenges that would need to be addressed in order to bring more resilience and long-term preservation practices into the space for open access books.

👉 About Mikael
Mikael Laakso is an Associate Professor in Information Studies at Tampere University, Finland. His research interests relate to scholarly information and communication very broadly, where one of the consistent themes has been research related open access publishing and open science practices. Having conducted research in this space for over 15 years, Mikael is experienced in a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to apply to create new knowledge within the space of scholarly information, ranging from policy/document analysis, bibliometrics & web metrics, surveys, interviews and beyond.

👉 Registration Link
https://unilu.webex.com/weblink/register/recaacc502afadf55c9f8bc4f44e5602c

👉 Please see also the full overview of all upcoming talks in the series.

We’re very much looking forward to her contribution and the opportunity to welcome participants from around the globe.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Ulrich Herb (June 30, 2025). Long-Term Preservation of Open Access Publications: Facts, Current Practices, and Future Outlook. Open Divide. Retrieved July 15, 2025 from https://opendivide.hypotheses.org/473


Published by Ulrich Herb

Graduate sociologist, information scientist (PhD degree), associate of scidecode science consulting – De Castro, Herb, Rothfritz GbR, working for the Saarland University and State Library (Germany)

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