Digital preservation policy

 

At the International Conference “Preservation of Digital Information in the Information Society: Problems and Perspectives,” held in Moscow from October 3 to 5, 2011, the final conference document, the Moscow Declaration on Digital Preservation, was unanimously approved. The Declaration highlights the importance of the issues raised at the conference and provides a set of measures and efforts to be adopted in areas such as policy, awareness and education, scientific research, the economy, the ICT industry, collaboration, and coordination.

The magazine Opuntia Brava bases its digital preservation policy on the guidelines established by the aforementioned conference and on those indicated by the International Institute for Educational Technological Research and Development INDTEC, C.A., sponsor of Scientific Journals, through digital preservation methods. This ensures the intellectual content of archived electronic documents for long periods of time; their attributes are maintained: integrity, authenticity, immutability, originality, reliability, and accessibility; in other words, they remain usable and unchanged over time.

Differences between preservation and backups

It should be understood that digital preservation is different from backups. What needs to be preserved is not the same as what needs to be stored as a backup. In this sense, it is conceptualized: Backups are protection against catastrophic events. What is stored as a backup in a digital library are basically two objects:

on one hand, the information published on the server (digital resources plus catalog information) and, on the other hand, digital resources in the editing process. Various methods can be followed: full backup, incremental backup, or rotating backups, for example, and the frequency is generally high (daily or weekly).

Digital preservation, however, does not deal with backing up either server data or daily work material, but with safeguarding high-quality digital resources that will be needed in the future. A publicly accessible library is created with automatically generated formats. In this regard, the method is usually the complete recording of the material once a year or every year and a half onto another new medium (refreshing).

In both cases, data integrity control mechanisms are used at the time of making copies, through redundancy algorithms that verify that the data remains as recorded.

In this sense, Opuntia Brava conditions digital integrity since, on the one hand, it has identified the possible causes of defects in digital information or data loss, such as: management errors and negligence, technical and mechanical failures, operator errors, viruses, unauthorized and undocumented changes, software obsolescence or incompatibility, program loss, incomplete metadata, and the aging of information. On the other hand, it has developed a digital preservation strategy that incorporates the following procedures:

  • Storage: store digital resources with utmost care.
  • Self-documentation: preserves information without reference to external documentation, minimizing dependencies on systems, data, or documentation.
  • Content type documentation: uses the LOCKSS digital preservation system (http://www.lockss.org/) from Stanford University. This provides open-source digital preservation services aimed at providing and permanently preserving access to digital content generated through our publication. Additionally, it allows digital content to be securely shared among participating libraries.
  • Hybrid approach: use this typology to avoid taking a reductionist position on a phenomenon of significant global importance.
  • Ensure that there is more than one copy on the computer and another on the other computers at the University of Las Tunas.
  • Every five years, transfer data to new storage media.
  • Package the information to be preserved along with descriptive metadata.
  • Emulation: allows the original software to be used without the need for the original system that ran it to continue existing. Emulation requires preserving a significant amount of information. Opuntia Brava preserves the emulator, the operating system, the application, and the data.
  • Migration: converts information to new formats. It is a measure against obsolescence.

In summary, the journal Opuntia Brava carries out systematic preservation actions, such as data rejuvenation, consistency checks, migration, emulation, technology preservation, and digital archaeology.

The magazine Opuntia Brava maintains a documentary record of all published articles (metadata), hosted on various international portals such as: Fuente Académica Plus (EBSCO), Law Journal Library (HeinOnline), MLA Database (Modern Language Association), LATINDEX Catalog v2.0 (UNAM, Mexico), ERIHPlus (Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills), The Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers (Levels 1 and 2), BIBLAT / CLASE (UNAM). Its presence on these portals reinforces its value as a space for critical thinking, interdisciplinary dialogue, and international projection from Cuba.

From its official website, it maintains a complete internal registration system that documents the history of all received manuscripts, including: manuscripts not dismissed (for meeting basic requirements), rejected (after detected plagiarism or negative peer review evaluations), pending (in process, pending review or editing), and published (international visibility). Although this is confidential internal information, it can be consulted and accessed by the Editorial Committee in cases of conflicts of interest, violations of academic integrity, or compliance with current legal processes.

File PreservationThe magazine Opuntia Brava uses its own file preservation system, supported by the service provider system of the Open Journal System 3.3.0.21 platform on the servers of the University of Las Tunas, which have their own file preservation mechanism based on their own policies and procedures. From this perspective, daily backups of all its servers are guaranteed, which can be discontinued after one month while keeping a copy, which is safeguarded for a full year.

It is edited using the free software Open Journal System (PKP/OJS) https://opuntiabrava.ult.edu.cu/index.php/opuntiabrava/gateway/lockss?year=2022

According to https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/2222-081X it is indexed in multiple international systems that guarantee its visibility, traceability, and digital preservation, such as:

  • TÍTULO DOI: Registro oficial del título con DOI en el Portal ISSN, lo que asegura su identificación única y persistente en el ecosistema editorial global.
  • CAMINO: Plataforma latinoamericana que promueve la visibilidad de revistas científicas de acceso abierto, vinculada a Latindex y Redalyc.
  • ZDB (Alemania): Base de datos central de revistas científicas en bibliotecas alemanas, lo que facilita el acceso desde instituciones europeas.
  • WIKIDATA: Entrada estructurada en Wikidata que vincula metadatos globales, conectando la revista con otros sistemas de conocimiento abierto.
  • SUDOC (Francia): Sistema universitario documental francés que registra revistas científicas en su catálogo nacional, ampliando el acceso desde bibliotecas francófonas.
  • OPENALEX: Open catalog of global research, successor to Microsoft Academic, which indexes journals and articles with enriched metadata.
  • LATINDEX (Directory): Basic registry that confirms the formal existence of the journal in the Ibero-American system of scientific publications.
  • LATINDEX (Catalog 2.0): Advanced evaluation that certifies compliance with more than 30 editorial criteria, including peer review, openness, periodicity, and transparency.
  • EZB (Germany): Electronic library of open access academic journals, used by European universities and research centers.
  • FATCAT: Open digital preservation archive that guarantees safe and long-term storage of published content.