This year, we are spotlighting our Connect and above level sponsors of the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL), taking place May 20-22, 2025 in Austin, Texas. We would like to thank CLOCKSS for their generous support of the event. Read on to learn more about the CLOCKSS team and the work that they do.
CLOCKSS: Working in and with Libraries in Texas to safeguard scholarship for future generations
In the digital age, the long-term preservation of scholarly content is more crucial than ever. As research continues to be published online, libraries, publishers, and academic institutions must address a pressing challenge: How can we ensure that scholarly knowledge remains accessible for future generations?
Texas has been a leader in digital preservation, with the Texas Digital Library (TDL) playing a key role in safeguarding academic resources. But did you know that CLOCKSS has also been deeply involved in digital preservation efforts in Texas? Through its partnerships with TDL and other preservation initiatives, CLOCKSS provides sustainable and secure digital archiving solutions, ensuring that critical scholarly content remains protected and accessible for years to come.
What is CLOCKSS?
CLOCKSS is a non-profit, community-owned digital archive committed to the permanent preservation of scholarly content. Our approach is rooted in partnership and library-led preservation, ensuring that academic knowledge remains accessible for future generations.
As part of a broader network of preservation services built around LOCKSS open-source software, CLOCKSS helps safeguard tens of thousands of journals and hundreds of thousands of books. Notably, we provide unique protection for more than 6,500 journals, ensuring they remain available even if their original publishers can no longer support them.
How CLOCKSS Works
At its core, CLOCKSS operates as a decentralized dark archive, meaning that its stored content is not actively accessible but is securely preserved until a trigger event—such as a publisher going out of business—means it is made available. Here’s how the system works:
Decentralized Archiving
Content is stored in a network of geographically distributed servers housed at leading research libraries worldwide, including Rice University here in Texas. Other stores are located outside the United States in places such as Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the UK. This ensures redundancy, resilience, and security against localized failures.
Dark Archive Model
Unlike other archives that provide continuous access, CLOCKSS keeps content in a secure, inaccessible state until a catastrophic event necessitates its release. This ensures protection from human error. The system regularly verifies the integrity of stored files, ensuring that data corruption or loss is swiftly detected and corrected.
Triggered Content Releases
If a journal or publisher ceases operations and content is no longer available through any other means, CLOCKSS makes it openly accessible under a Creative Commons license, ensuring permanent access.
Why choose CLOCKSS as your strategic preservation partner
CLOCKSS is…
A Cost-Effective Solution for Digital Preservation
Preserving the scholarly record is a monumental task that no single library or country can undertake alone. Collaboration is the key to success, and among the international partners available, we offer the most affordable solution. Our virtual organization operates with a small team and minimal administrative overhead, allowing us to focus on cost-effective solutions while delivering a friendly, agile, and personal service.
In addition, we created a tiered pricing scheme, based on library materials budgets, that ensures fairness and accessibility. We offer discounts to recognize a country’s purchasing power parity, as well as for consortial participation for parallel structure.
Committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility
We are dedicated to building a diverse, global, and inclusive scholarly archive by incorporating a wide range of content, languages, libraries, publishers, and subjects. Our support extends to publishers of all business models, sizes, and disciplines, as well as libraries of every type and scale. We are committed to ensuring broad access to our preservation services, working with each participant to accommodate their financial capabilities while making long-term digital preservation accessible to all.
Committed to Open Access and Open Scholarship
CLOCKSS contributes to the sustainable funding of the LOCKSS open-source preservation software. This software is freely available for any organization, anywhere in the world, to use. This could include, for example, local preservation of electronic theses or dissertations or materials hosted in your institutional repositories.
We have strategic partnerships with DOAB, DOAJ, OAPEN and others to support small Open Access book and journal publishers. Partnering with us helps libraries and publishers comply with funder and institutional Open Access policies and mandates.
All content accessible from the CLOCKSS archive is made available under an Open Access license.
A Community of Practice
Our aim is to connect local and international communities of practice, and foster collaboration and knowledge exchange in the field of digital preservation. This helps strengthen the global network of professionals working to safeguard academic and cultural heritage.
Final Thoughts: ensuring the future of knowledge
In an era of rapid technological change, scholarly content must be protected from digital decay and unexpected disruptions, or it can disappear or be taken away. CLOCKSS provides a reliable, independent, international and open solution for preserving academic research—ensuring that today’s knowledge remains accessible to future generations. Together, we can safeguard the future of knowledge.
Want to learn more? Visit CLOCKSS.org and explore how your institution can participate in preserving the academic record for generations to come.
Thank you to CLOCKSS for sponsoring TCDL 2025! Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities. We are accepting sponsorship confirmations through Friday, April 18, 2025.