In late 2006, The University of Iowa Libraries became a charter member of Portico (http://www.portico.org/). Portico offers a service which provides a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.
Background:
The scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core electronic scholarly literature exceeds that which can be supported by any individual library or institutional budget. After extensive, iterative discussion in the library and publisher communities, the Portico electronic archiving service has been shaped in response to this need. Initial support for Portico is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and JSTOR.
Portico provides all libraries supporting the archive with campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur, and when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other source. Trigger events include:
* A publisher stops operations; or
* A publisher ceases to publish a title; or
* A publisher no longer offers back issues; or
* Upon catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher’s delivery platform.
Portico also provides a reliable means to secure perpetual access, if participating publishers choose to designate Portico as a provider of post-cancellation access. In addition, select librarians at participating libraries are granted password-controlled access for verification and audit purposes only.
View current list of participating publishers (more join every month):
http://www.portico.org/about/part_publishers.html
View a list of committed journal titles:
http://www.portico.org/about/committed_titles_alpha.html
