News

Recent research has demonstrated that dozens of online-only Open Access journals are no longer available, while hundreds of others are inactive and at risk of being lost. Important scholarship may be lost to future generations of researchers if there is no preservation plan in place.

Portico, a not-for-profit organisation with a mission to preserve the scholarly record, is working with publishers and libraries to ensure that academic content remains accessible and usable for the long term. Currently, Portico is preserving more than 5,000 Open Access journals from 309 publishers. Portico provides public access to 114 OA journals that are no longer available through other digital platforms. This content remains available to everyone on an Open Access basis after being triggered on Portico.

Portico has focused efforts on the ‘long tail’ of publishers that publish ten or fewer titles, and is currently preserving content from more than 400 small publishers. In addition, Portico has broad international coverage; Portico is preserving scholarship from publishers in 74 countries. Full list of over 800 participating publishers is available at https://www.portico.org/coverage/publishers/.

Complex new forms of scholarship, such as enhanced digital monographs, are also at risk. As the ebook format has matured, authors and publishers have experimented with advanced features afforded by the digital medium, and these works pose different preservation challenges than standard monographs. Portico is part of a collaborative effort, led by NYU Libraries and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to develop best practices for publishers to guide them on how to apply enhancements to publications in a way that can be preserved at scale, or otherwise be aware of the preservation risks of implementing various enhanced features.

Portico explores methods for preserving more of the most vulnerable content. Portico is planning further discussions on the topic with librarians and publishers.

Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.