Addressing the E-Journal Preservation Conundrum: Understanding Portico
Presented by Ken DiFiore, Associate Director, Library Relations, Portico
Librarians transition to e-resources are well underway.
E-resources have unique characteristics
1. Generally licensed not owned
2. Technology dependent
3. Inherent fragility to the pace of technological change
4. Multitude of electronic formats
Questions
Who assumes responsibility for preservation?
How will long-term preservation be sustained?
How will the data integrity be maintained?
What objects should be preserved first?
Background
JSTOR started in 2002 as an electronic archiving initiative
They hoped that publishers would come to them to preserve e-only issues.
JSTOR also wanted to impact the broader community by assisting with the transition to e-only journals. So with the help of Ithaka Portico was born
Mission – preserve e-only scholarly material to remain available to future generations of scholars, researchers, and students.
Philosophy – utilizing best practices, to work in a cooperative way with libraries and publishers to balance the interests of both.
Initial Focus – open of all peer-reviewed journals, preserved journals may have a print version in addition to an version, or they may be available only in electronic format. They are now also looking at E-books.
Portico’s E-journal Archiving Service
42 publishers
6,200 titles
Range from commercial, university press, and professional society publishers.
Recently just signed a contract with Springer!
Current e-journal content (“born digital”) or digitized print (“reborn digital”)
Portico does not do any digitalization itself
Publishers sign a 3-year archiving agreement
Make annual contribution according to annual journals revenues (range from $250 to $75,000).
Content cannot be removed that is deposited with Portico
Majority have elected the option to allow Portico to satisfy post-cancellation access claims.
Look and feel of the value added feature that are part of the publishers interface are not captured for long-term preservation. The focus is on the intellectual content.
Publishers use XML markup and import it directly into portico. Along with and graphics, photos, and PDF of the article.
Reduces or eliminated the dependency on specific technology platform for future use of e-journal content.
If the publishers have the front and back matter or supp. Material they usually provide it.
Archiving Service Model
The content preparation is done for each including:
Transform of the xml to NLM DTD
Creation of a metadata record for each article (METS)
Validate of the format for each article
Scan for viruses
Portico is committed to keeping the data format viable and will convert the content if necessary as the formats change over time.
PDF’s are converted to PDF/A the archival standard for PDF format
Portico Preservation Infrastructure
Fully operational since Jan 2006
Ingesting publisher content at an average rate to approx .5 million articles/year (?? Need to check this number)
Nearly 2 million articles in the archive presently
Expected to exceed goal of 4 mill articles in 2007
Portico’s E-Journal Archiving Service Model
375 library participants now
Libraries sign a 5-year agreement
25% of libraries are from outside U.S.
Libraries are asked to make an annual support payment based on LME
Founders get a discount
ACCESS MODEL
Two scenarios
Trigger event – lost, orphaned or abandoned
Back issues are removed and not avail anymore
Publisher ceases
Catastrophic failure by publisher delivered platform for a sustained period of time.
You get access to the content whether you subscribed or not.
Portico Archive Access Model
There is a rider that publishers can sign about 2/3 (85% of titles) allowing portico to host issues in post cancellation event.
4 user names and passwords per institutions to audit
Benefits to libraries
Facilitate libraries in the transition to elec. Environment
Provide practical mechanism to address “perpetual access” needs.
Shared infrastructure or virtual stacks reduces preservation costs system wide.
Provides a means of assuring access to e-resources over the long term and protects against gaps in library collections.
Libraries can send them list of issn’s and they will compare this to what is in Portico’s holdings. This is free service.
We all need to ask publishers to designate Portico as the post cancellation preservation provider.
Openurl is coming
Doi should be transferred
Crossref is also implemented
