Now, another possible thing to consider here, as formats change, is whether that is an issue. When we went from an oral tradition to a print tradition, I expect soem people were concerned that the words would become static. As an erstwhile storyteller, I know this can be a problem – stories are meant to be alive and to change. Print is not. As we move digitally, and format can affect the content (remembering those 60’s words of Marshall Macluen “the medium is the message”)are we reapproaching the oral era?

Before that can be achieved, however, two things are needed: first, the content development task, of identifying the desired content, persuading those who run the LOCKSS boxes to agree to include the content, and persuading the proprietors of the journals to agree to the relatively small changes that are needed to allow their content to be collected. Second, a certain amount of (not very) technical work has to be done, in the creation of LOCKSS plugins and manifest pages (if memory serves me right). Some of this is currently done by the LOCKSS team, some has to be done with or by the people who host the journal pages. This work seems to me to be a scalability limitation of LOCKSS at the moment, but with greater community involvement that limitation might go away.

LOCKSS has good capabilities for dealing with the open/closed access issues you mention. In a way, the detailed efforts to deal properly with copyright introduce some of those scalability issues.

Oh, and on the sustainability issue, highly distributed and cheap beats centralised and expensive any day. Just think of the dreadful words “policy change” or “funding cuts”. We can’t rely on government to do these things. Sustainability is us!

I would strongly encourage you to be in touch with Vicky Reich of the LOCKSS team…

There are really a number of existing LOCKSS networks, and if Mary is right, then none of them should exist. (But Mary is not right.) I also take issue with the pejorative use of the word “lofty” with respect to a last-copy proposal… but I’ll wait for my longer response before addressing her post in detail. If nothing else, it’s an excellent set-up for what I will next write.

In a nutshell: given that a LOCKSS journal preservation network already exists, this proposal isn’t so much creating a new “separate and unequal” preservation system as it is integrating more literary journals into an established, working, and scalable system.

In the second paragraph of Respect for publishing models, did you mean to continue this thought? “Also, as noted earlier, the subscription model”