A perpetual motion machine: The preserved digital scholarly record

Key points Digital preservation will never be a solved problem: it needs constant reinvention, and is going to become harder over time. Scholarship is changing and this is affecting what needs to be preserved and what preservation means to the future of knowledge discovery. The diversification of outputs means that knowledge exists in a network of contextual metadata, data, software, standards and publications-requiring multilateral management of this complex knowledge graph. Preservation demands new skills, technologies and resources from librarians, publishers, funders and institutions-and more joined-up thinking about archiving.