Digital preservation of academic journals is essential to ensure long-term access to their contents, which requires the use of durable formats that are resilient to technological change. In traditional editorial workflows, journals typically produce generic PDF files that are deposited in repositories without guarantees of long-term preservation. As a result, repositories must independently decide whether to convert these files into PDF/A or other preservation-friendly formats. Moreover, the absence of a single, widely adopted standard limits interoperability between publishers and repositories. This work proposes leveraging the publication workflow of Open Journal Systems (OJS) to generate, at the point of origin, both JATS XML and preservation-ready PDF/A files, and to package them using the BagIt standard to facilitate repository deposit. In the proposed implementation, OJS plugins automatically convert articles from DOCX to JATS and generate final PDF/A outputs. This integrated approach shifts preservation responsibilities to the editorial workflow, significantly reducing the burden on repositories while improving interoperability and archival readiness. To date, the system has successfully generated JATS XML and PDF/A files, with BagIt packaging planned as the next step toward a complete preservation workflow.
Soler et al. (Thu,) studied this question.