Overview

Digital Commons maintains industry standard best practices for backing up posted content, detailed in Safeguarding Your Content with Digital Commons. To further protect their content, many Digital Commons subscribers have expressed interest in maintaining independent archival copies of their repositories. In addition to making bepress Archive available for this purpose, we have also partnered with Stanford University’s LOCKSS program—Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe—to implement an OAIS-compliant archival solution using the award-winning LOCKSS technology.

Digital Commons subscribers can leverage the LOCKSS technology to create a Digital Commons “Private LOCKSS Network” (PLN). In its essence, the PLN is a group of Digital Commons subscribers who coordinate to back up each other’s content. This approach provides geographic distribution of archived content using a network of “LOCKSS boxes” located at participating institutions.

To read more about the LOCKSS program, visit https://www.lockss.org/join-lockss.

Advantages to LOCKSS Participants

• Lots of copies. Participating in a PLN provides backups of your content in geographically diverse locations. This mitigates the risks posed by hardware and software failures, operator errors, and economic or organization failures at any of the participating nodes in a PLN.
• Emergency recovery. In the event of a catastrophic emergency, content preserved via LOCKSS will be made available online and open access.
• Ease of maintenance. LOCKSS boxes are relatively easy to set up and require little ongoing maintenance.

Next Steps

1. Contact Consulting Services (see our Contact Us page) to prepare your repository for archiving. Identify any publications whose content should be excluded from the archive, e.g., publications without full texts or with restricted-access content. (This content can be archived at a later date, if desired.)
2. Contact the LOCKSS organization (https://www.lockss.org/contact) for instructions to participate. Note that membership in the LOCKSS alliance is required for inclusion in a PLN.