Applying Open Access and Open Data to the Archiving of Long-Form Scholarship: A Comparative Analysis of Existing Services Through the Lens of the Copim Open Archiving Criteria | Zenodo Skip to main Communities My dashboard Log in Sign up Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (Copim) Published April 30, 2026 | Version 1.0 Report Open Applying Open Access and Open Data to the Archiving of Long-Form Scholarship: A Comparative Analysis of Existing Services Through the Lens of the Copim Open Archiving Criteria Authors/Creators Steiner, Tobias 1 Cole, Gareth 2 Fry, Jenny 3 Gatti, Rupert 4 Higman, Ross 1 Stokes, Paul 5 Turpin, Holly 3 Show affiliations 1. Thoth Open Metadata 2. University of Exeter 3. Loughborough University 4.
University of Cambridge Trinity College 5. Jisc Description As a recent study by Bell et. al. (2026) has indicated, the long-term preservation of the digital scholarly long-form (e.g. monographs, edited collections, theses, reports, etc.) holds multifaceted challenges. This holds particularly true in the context of preserving open access long-form scholarly output. Small-to-medium-sized institutional as well as independent, scholar-led presses make up much of the “long tail” of publishers without an active preservation policy in place, putting their significant contributions to the scholarly record at risk. As a recent study dissecting the archiving and preservation status of open access books suggests, there is “reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all” (Laakso, 2023). And while larger publishers usually have existing agreements with digital preservation services such as CLOCKSS and Portico in place, smaller presses often languish without financial or institutional support, while simultaneously facing challenges when it comes to the availability of technical expertise and staff resources (Barnes et al. 2022). Furthermore, many of the established archiving solutions have been developed with a “traditional”, closed-access model of publication in mind. In contrast, open access titles, as per their definition, are made available openly on the web. As the foundational Budapest Open Access Initiative has posited in 2002: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. (Chan et. al., 2022) The remit of open access, then, poses new challenges to archiving and preservation workflows. Higman et al. (2025) have recently identified distinct factors when considering fully open access publishing outputs and practices. The team outlined a set of criteria that are considered essential to any approach to archiving that aims to preserve the open nature of the content to be preserved. This set of criteria, now titled Copim Open Archiving Criteria (Cole et. al. 2026), include the following: Content remains accessible in an open way Metadata remains accessible openly Archiving processes remain transparent and are verifiable in an open way: Adherence to Accepted Good Practice in Digital Archiving Operations In addition, desirable features of such an open approach to archiving include support for the archival of supplementary and web-based materials, well-defined content removal policies, the provision of usage statistics, and independence from private or government-controlled entities. The report at hand takes these open archiving criteria as a starting point, and uses the defined set as the basis of a comprehensive analysis of five prominent solutions commonly used for archiving of digital content, including books: CLOCKSS, Portico, the Internet Archive, Zenodo, and Figshare. The analysis is structured around the above-outlined eight key criteria, and ranges from questions of content accessibility and technical reliability to organisational independence and sustainability. The goal of this analysis is to provide an informed overview that moves beyond a simple feature comparison, and towards a more nuanced understanding of each solution's underlying philosophy, governance model, and strategic value proposition. Supporting documents: Report document, in multiple file formats; Spreadsheet `2026-04 Archiving Platform Comparison against Open Archiving criteria`, This also available as a live online spreadsheet ; and the full bibliography of referenced works in BibTeX and Zotero RDF formats. The extended bibliography can also be accessed via this open Zotero collection . 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Versions External resources Indexed in OpenAIRE Communities Keywords and subjects Keywords open archiving open access publishing preservation CLOCKSS Portico Internet Archive Zenodo Figshare Details DOI DOI Badge DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19882343 Markdown [](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19882343) reStructuredText .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19882343.svg :target: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19882343 HTML <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19882343"><img src="https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19882343.svg" alt="DOI"></a> Image URL https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19882343.svg Target URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19882343 Resource type Report Publisher Zenodo Languages English Rights License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited. 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