Editorial

Preserving today's scientific record for tomorrow

BMJ 2004; 328 doi: 10.1136/bmj.328.7431.61 (Published 8 January 2004)
Cite this as: BMJ 2004;328:61

Access to the full text of this article requires a subscription or payment. Please log in or subscribe below.

  1. Victoria Reich, director (vreich@stanford.edu),
  2. David Rosenthal, chief scientist (dshr@stanford.edu)
  1. LOCKSS Program, 1454 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA

    LOCKSS marries age old concepts of librarianship with modern technology

    Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

    Thomas Jefferson1

    Information stored on paper can survive for millennia; information stored digitally today may not be recoverable this time next week. With seven million pages of new information added to the world wide web each day, the volatility of websites has emerged as an urgent problem, especially as websites are becoming the version of record for scientific journals. Three studies of links in peer reviewed journals all found their useful life to be a few …

    Access to the full text of this article requires a subscription or payment

    Subscribe

    Article access

    Article access for 1 day

    Purchase this article for £20 $30 €32*

    The PDF version can be downloaded as your personal record

    * Prices do not include VAT

    Rapid responses

    THIS WEEK'S POLL

    BMJ most popular