• About Portico
  • Why Archive?
  • Sustaining the Archive
  • Archival Approach
  • In the Community
  • Advisory Committee
  • Participating Publishers
  • Participating Libraries
  • Committed Journal Titles
  • Preserving Scholarship Together
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About Portico

Mission

The mission of Portico is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students.

The Portico Solution

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 offers a service which provides a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.

History

Portico began as the Electronic-Archiving Initiative launched by JSTOR in 2002 with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build upon The Foundation's seminal E-Journal Archiving Program. The charge of the Electronic-Archiving Initiative was to build a sustainable electronic-archiving model, and for more than two years, project staff worked on the development of necessary technology and engaged in extensive discussions with publishers and libraries to craft an approach that balances the needs of publishers and libraries while generating sufficient funding for the archive. In 2004, the Electronic-Archiving Initiative became a part of Ithaka Harbors, Inc., a non-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education around the world. Building upon extensive input gathered from commercial and not-for-profit publishers and guidance offered from libraries at a range of small, medium and large academic libraries, an electronic archiving service, known as Portico, was developed. Portico was launched in 2005 with additional support from JSTOR, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Download the Portico brochure for more information.

Last updated on November 30, 2007