Moving Beyond the Ubiquitous PDF for Durham Statement Compliance

As an aspirational goal. the Durham Statement on Open Access states:

Repositories should rely upon open standards for the archiving of works, as well as on redundant formats, such as PDF copies. We also urge law schools and law libraries to agree to and use a standard set of metadata to catalog each article to ensure easy online public indexing of legal scholarship.

Tasked with figuring out how Valparaiso University School of Law can comply with the Durham Statement Sarah Glassmeyer writes in Getting to Durham Compliance

I am concerned that these online journals are becoming PDF dumping grounds with little to no metadata or access points contained within them to assist with the “access” part of “open access.” I hope that law schools, in their attempts to becoming compliant with the Durham Statement, don’t forget to include the access points to their journals.

In Time to Move Forward: On the First Anniversary of the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, I wrote

Hopefully the objective of the Durham Statement will be realized by following the suggestion made by ALA and ACRL. In their OSTP comments regarding public access policies for science and technology funding agencies across the federal government, ALA and ACRL called for across-the-board format standardization as being crucial to long-term public access. Instead of PDF files, authorized repositories should provide support for file conversion to a standard mark-up language (e.g., XML) because the PDF format "does not support robust searching, linking, text-mining, or reformatting over the long-term, nor does it provide full accessibility for the blind and reading impaired."

The issue will be addressed in the LIPA's program, The Durham Statement on Open Access One Year Later: Preservation and Authentication of Legal Scholarship, on July 13th in Denver. From the program description:

The Statement provoked strong reactions from law librarians and others concerned about the lack of "stable, open, and digital" formats for preserving electronic journals. The participants in this program, two law school information technologists and a prominent law library director, will have worked together for a year examining questions involved in developing "stable, open, and digital" formats for electronic journals. They will present the results of their efforts and alternatives for moving forward at this program.

[JH]