The not-for-profit digital archive Portico and CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) have entered into an agreement to support the preservation requirements of the policy memorandum released in February 2013 by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). This policy directs United States federal agencies to develop plans to make articles reporting on the research they fund freely available to the public immediately or after an embargo period and highlights requirements needed to ensure long-term access to this research through preservation.

“Making sure that articles reporting on federally funded research are preserved and will always be freely available to the public is a key CHORUS objective,” said Howard Ratner, executive director of CHORUS. “To that end, we are pleased to be working with Portico, a trusted dark archive that has served the preservation needs of the scholarly research community for years.”

Portico already preserves more than 18,700 academic journals, including those from major scientific publishers. Through the agreement, Portico will provide CHORUS with preservation status for articles reporting on U.S.-funded research for those publishers who are members of CHORUS as well as Portico. To ensure compliance, this group of publishers will extend their existing agreements with Portico to allow Portico to provide public access to relevant articles in the event of a public access failure, whereby an article is no longer openly available to the public through a publisher’s site.

“Portico’s mission is to support the preservation needs of publishers, librarians, and researchers as new projects develop out of the changing scholarly landscape,” commented Kate Wittenberg, managing director of Portico. “We are pleased to be able to advance our mission through this agreement with CHORUS.”