Digital Preservation
Resources are truly open if other people can access them, and this requires active preservation to ensure that the files continue to be available and readable over the long term.
In order to ensure that the OpenMed results remain available beyond the end of the project, a digital preservation strategy has been implemented to ensure that every content produced by the project remains accessible to the public.
Some of the resources created by the project, such as the compendium, and the OpenMed Course, have a great potential to be further adopted and adapted at global level. Also, the OER-related projects created by participants in the course can help to inspire others in adopting Open Educational Practices.
This legacy strategy was agreed by members of the OpenMed consortium and led by Coventry University, and the tools were carefully selected, in order to ensure that the tools comply with sustainability standards to widespread and facilitate access to the OpenMed resources.
The strategy contemplates the following elements:
- OpenMed website: The content hosted under the domain www.openmedproject.eu, will remain available under the original domain until October 2023, and after such date , the site will be rehosted to a subdomain under the domain name of the coordinating institution: openmed.uni-med.net., A disclaimer will be added to let visitors know the URL where content will be archived.
- Publications: All documents published by the consortium (the Compendium, Executive Summary, Agenda, Roadmaps, the evaluation reports) are currently available in https://openmedproject.eu/publications/. Some of these outputs, as well as research outputs (i.e. publications, datasets) resulting from the project, have been archived in Zenodo.org, a repository created by CERN and OpenAIRE that allow researchers in any field to deposit and share their work (as part of the process, outputs have been assigned a DOI).
- Videos: A number of video-recordings have been produced throughout the project (presentations, interviews, webinars, etc.). Videos are hosted on both YouTube and Internet Archive: “a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” All these videos have been gathered, and tagged with relevant metadata, at website under the project’s domain: https://videos.openmedproject.eu/ (to be transferred to a subdomain of uni-med.net for preservation beyond 2023).
- Photos: The various meetings and events hosted throughout the project have been documented by means of photographs taken and shared by participants on http://photos.openmedproject.eu/. This repository of images will be transferred to a subdomain of uni-med.net for preservation beyond 2023 as well.
- Course: The OpenMed Course contents is one of the main outputs of the project. After making improvements based on feedback and inputs, from both participants in the pilot and external experts, the revised version is available on Sakai.
- UNIR OpenEd. The course is available on the UNIR OpenEd hub (e.g. Sakai v11) at http://opened.unir.net and http://rd.unir.net/openmed-course/ until 31/10/2019 by a number of access ways, including free registration (with a login and password – OA to be defined).
- IMS Common Cartridge. A number of IMS Common Cartridge content packages (one per language and inter-operable export version), are available on the project website. These packages can be downloaded and installed in universities’ learning management systems, as explained here.
- Open Web Version. The content of the course has been released by means of separate WordPress site hosted under the project’s domain at course.openmedproject.eu. Anyone with Internet access is able to follow the course at their own pace and download any content without costs, registrations, or other restrictions. Quizzes and other interactive content have been replicated with http://h5p.org/. In addition to this, this version of the course include suggestions of various communications tools (e.g. JoinMastodon.org, Twitter, Gitter) that could be of use as an alternative/equivalent to forums in LMS versions for those wishing to take the course as group.
- PDF / WORD Version. The content of the course has been released on a PDF and Word versions for printing, and hosted under the main project’s domain. PDF documents have been created as PDF/A, an ISO-standardised version of the PDF specialised for use in the archiving and long-term preservation of electronic documents.
The digital preservation plan can be adopted by similar projects as it provides guidelines to ensure that the content and resources produced with European and other public funds remain available for the public in order to foster open and public access to knowledge.