Introduction

This toolkit is intended to provide an overview and guidance for the archiving and preservation of ‘simple’ open access ebooks, targeted primarily at small publishers.  As will become clear, archiving and preservation should not be considered the role of the publisher alone - and considerations of archiving needs to be taken by all actors, starting with the author. We believe that the advice and recommendations contained in this toolkit, and the underlying research, is important for authors and all participants in scholarly research and communication - but we focus on the roles and actions publishers can take.

In the following sections we will consider what we mean by a 'simple' ebook, and considerations for publishers in developing an archiving strategy for a publication - noting that it may be that different ebooks need different strategies.

But the primary recommendations for publishers in creating an archiving strategy are:

1. Identify the content that is important to archive. See the why archive and what to archive sections.

2. Archive standardised and widely adopted formats for all content (including metadata) - this will facilitate future format migration. See the what formats section.

3. Use multiple complementary archiving solutions - don’t rely on a single solution. See the where to archive section.

4. Adopt permanent identifiers and broadly adopted standardised terminologies within metadata and avoid bespoke terms and specifications. See the metadata section.

5. Describe the structure and nature of the content and links within the publication to allow layouts, fonts, descriptions of images and embedded content and links to be reconstructed if necessary. Applying accessibility standards to publications will help with this, and some file formats are better for this than others. See the Outgoing links section.