Portico and the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries (CSAL) today announced a historic 10-year consortium-wide agreement that brings all CSAL primary member libraries in as Portico participants. By joining Portico, Swiss libraries and the communities they serve can be assured of enduring access to the academic e-journals and e-books they have invested in. The agreement covers the state universities in Switzerland, the Federal Institutes of Technology Domain, as well as the Universities of Applied Sciences and the Swiss National Library.

Dr. Rafael Ball, Library Director at ETH Zurich and project manager of CSAL said, “This ten-year collaboration between the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries and Portico emphasizes the importance that Swiss Universities, the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain, and other major research institutions have placed in adopting a nationwide strategy for the long-term preservation of e-resources. Securing continued and complete access to e-resources is fundamental for successful research and education in Switzerland. By concluding the licence with Portico, we have reached a milestone.”

“We are very pleased that institutions around the world are recognizing the importance of digital preservation,” said Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director of Portico. “We believe that preservation is a community effort, and it’s wonderful to see the collaboration among institutions and consortia to address preservation at a national level.”

The agreement with CSAL covers participation in both the Portico e-journal and e-books services, made possible through the National Licenses project funded by the program “Scientific Information: Access, Processing and Safeguarding” (conducted by swissuniversities). CSAL joins more than 900 other libraries from 21 countries that participate in Portico. In addition to the support of libraries, more than 400 publishers—representing over 2,000 societies and associations—participate in Portico. The Portico archive now holds 1.2 billion files, representing more than 470,000 e-books and 62 million articles from over 22,000 e-journals.