Never before has it been as easy as it is today, in the age of the Internet, to make information freely available to a broad public, and at very low cost to the provider. On the other hand, the fact that digital information is no longer physically materialized in the same way as a widely copied, printed book poses major problems when it comes to keeping publications available for posterity.

German National Library

For this essential task of long-term archiving, Dagstuhl Publishing has been working with the German National Library for many years. The German National Library has a legal mandate to collect and archive, among other things, media works published in Germany and maintains the necessary infrastructure (see here for further details).

In 2025, Dagstuhl Publishing changed its archiving mode: Whereas previously only the PDFs of complete volumes and issues were (manually) registered with the DNB for long-term archiving, since mid-2025 we have been using the OAI interface of the DROPS publication server (https://drops.dagstuhl.de) to deliver all individual documents to the DNB. The exchange is based on a special metadata format (xMetaDissPlus) from the DNB, which is delivered by the OAI interface of for all documents published by Dagstuhl.

PDF/A

While this solves the problem of the published files remaining available in the long run, some additional effort is needed to keep them readable in the future. To ensure this, Dagstuhl Publishing has established the so-called PDF/A  format (Portable Document Format Archivable) as its standard format since 2021. The basic idea here is that a PDF/A-compliant document contains all the information itself (e.g., fonts) that is required for its faithful representation (see our article on PDF/A). By combining this standard with the DNB's archiving service, we offer optimal conditions for ensuring that documents published by Dagstuhl Publishing can be used in the long term.

Beyond PDFs

In addition to the actual text-based description of results, other materials such as software or data are often an integral part of research. With the support of our authors in archiving and publishing research software, an important first step has been taken toward making such materials permanently available and closely interlinked with the document. This has been realized in the context of the FAIRCORE4EOSC project. See also our related blog post for further details.