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title: Preservation as a Memento Mori and Matter of Ethics
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When training PhD students and other postgraduates, we often have a section on publication. It covers the basic background process, the rudiments of peer review, and what to expect. There is often, also, a lengthy discussion of ensuring that you publish in the place that will do most for your career. What is the _prestige_ status of the journal, for instance? While open access is often now part of these conversations, not least because of the UK’s REF, it is sometimes framed as a _threat_ to this individual advancement.

A conversation at this stage about digital preservation would not go amiss. Digital preservation is crucial to ensuring the decadal- and centuries-long accessibility of scholarship. In other words, it asks us to consider how the conversation around a piece of work will continue, beyond the lifespan of its creator. It asks us to consider that point when a work enters the public domain and is no longer under the author’s copyright, it asks us to consider a purpose for scholarship that is greater than self-advancement. Digital preservation is a _memento mori_ in the scholarly world – our own anamorphic skull – that assumes the oblivion of the individual and the continuity of the artefact. Perhaps that is why so few people want to look it in the face.

Digital preservation becomes a matter of ethics under this scenario. It becomes concerned with at least one definition of ethics because it is about a relationship to the other, not the self, because it considers a time when that self no longer exists. Of course, there are many other ethical considerations involved in preservation. We must decide what to preserve in the present, banking on the future to forgive us for the impossibility of saving everything. As such, it invites a kinship with the future; an assumption that there is a chain of understanding, of shared values, with those who will come after us.

But introducing the notion of a scholarship _without an author_ as core seems a valuable activity in postgraduate training. Rather than strengthening notions of intellectual property ownership over research outputs, it might be worth inviting the next generation of researchers to think about what their work will do, _once they have died_ and are no more. Scholarship for others, not for the self.