Portico’s preservation approach and policies are composed with advice and guidance from the publishing and library communities.

This spirit of global collaboration, transparency, and commitment has made us one of the leading digital preservation services in the world. A growing number of libraries participate in Portico as part of their digital preservation strategy, and we enjoy widespread support among the scholarly publishing community. Here’s why:

Organizational sustainability

Portico has a diversified funding stream from more than 1,000 libraries and hundreds of publishers (representing over 2,000 societies and associations) and a commitment to good business practices with short- and long-term financial planning, including annual financial audits.

Best practices

Our content model and processes are informed by a number of community standards, including:

Portico was the first digital preservation service to be independently audited by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and certified as a trusted, reliable digital preservation solution that serves the needs of the library community (following the general metrics found in their Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification). The stated purpose of the CRL audit was to promote understanding of and, where justified, confidence in, digital repositories. Read the final audit report

Relationships

We believe that collaborative development is a keystone of success. Portico consults regularly with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands – KB), the Library of Congress, the British Library, and other members of the digital preservation community. We are a contributor to the Open Preservation Foundation and served as a partner in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-funded RMap Project. We collaborated with other organizations on the development of the PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) data dictionary and work closely with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) on the development and maintenance of the Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite and others. We work with CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) 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). We are also active members of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance.

Clear legal rights

Portico has license agreements with the publishers that allow us to preserve the content for the long-term (including migrating or transforming the content as necessary) and deliver the content should specific trigger events occur. Portico license agreements also grant us the right to name a successor not-for-profit organization.

Access rights

Titles preserved within Portico become broadly available for use to the faculty, staff, and students at participating institutions when specific trigger events occur. We can also provide post-cancellation access (also referred to as perpetual access) to titles for which the publisher has selected Portico as the provider.

Transparency

We aim for transparency in our actions and content. Portico provides participating libraries and publishers with accounts to audit or review content in the archive as they deem necessary.

A list of the holdings currently preserved in the Portico archive and those scheduled to be processed is available.

We offer a holdings comparison service that allows libraries to identify overlap between their holdings and ours. And we support the work of The Keepers Registry to build an e-journals preservation registry service.

We have also committed to ongoing preservation audits by the Center for Research Libraries and provide regular updates to the library and publisher communities about the status of content preserved in Portico.

Expertise

The Portico leadership group is highly active in the preservation field and its members participate in new research, standards, and technologies.