News & Events

Researchers increasingly access journal articles online, but the real possibility exists that, due to natural disaster or human/computing failure, digital content might not always be available. Libraries and publishers have joined forces in an initiative called CLOCKSS, providing leadership and the supporting technology, to ensure reliable, long-term access to scholarly e-content.

The moment has arrived to see how CLOCKSS works.

As of today, the web-published content of the journal Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation (SAGE Publications) has been exported from the CLOCKSS archive, and is now available to the world from two CLOCKSS hosting platforms at universities in Europe and the US. Released under a Creative Commons license, this content is free to researchers, students and the general public, without need of any subscription.

CLOCKSS is a trusted and secure dark archive, preserving scholarly journal content from the world's leading publishers. The CLOCKSS system is based on geographically-dispersed nodes located at major research libraries into which e-journal content from publishers is routinely ingested. Archived copies remain "dark" (hidden, secure and unavailable for use), until a trigger event and the CLOCKSS Board votes to "light up" the content and restore access to it again via a hosting platform. At present there are seven archive nodes and two hosting platforms. These numbers are expected to double in order to achieve added security from global coverage.

SAGE Publications is one of 11 premier publishers (together accounting for about 60% of e-journal content) participating in the CLOCKSS Pilot and serving on the CLOCKSS Board. When SAGE announced that it was discontinuing Graft, this became the first real-world test for the CLOCKSS system and its procedures: the CLOCKSS Board, comprising both publishers and library organizations, determined that a trigger event had occurred; instruction was given for Graft content to be copied from archive nodes in the CLOCKSS network to the designated hosting platforms; and 18 issues of Graft became available to the world.

Stanford University, where the underlying LOCKSS software was developed, and the University of Edinburgh are among the seven participants on the library side, acting as stewards for the CLOCKSS system. The two universities have also been designated as CLOCKSS hosting platforms in order to demonstrate, through the release of content, how CLOCKSS works, with EDINA, the UK national data centre at Edinburgh, playing that role for Europe, and Stanford University Library doing so for the US. Both serve as points of worldwide access, free to all, without any prior subscription, fee, or registration. 

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Participating Libraries in the CLOCKSS Pilot
Indiana University, New York Public Library, OCLC, Rice University, Stanford University, University of Edinburgh, and University of Virginia

Participating Publishers in the CLOCKSS Pilot
American Chemical Society, American Medical Association, American Physiological Society, Elsevier, IOP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell.

In June 2007 CLOCKSS was the inaugural winner of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) Outstanding Collaboration Citation, which recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials.  The ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.

The CLOCKSS initiative is funded by participating publishers and library organizations, as well as by a grant from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) via the US Library of Congress.  The grant is intended to finance CLOCKSS through a mixture of ingest fees from publishers and revenue from an endowment raised from voluntary contributions over the next five years.  The need to secure long-term sustainable funding for CLOCKSS will be one of the key strategic issues facing the Board in 2008.