Portico Services & Benefits

Portico provides libraries and publishers with a reliable, cost-effective solution to one of the most critical challenges facing the scholarly community today—ensuring that the electronic resources you rely on everyday will be accessible to future researchers, scholars, and students.

We preserve tens of thousands of e-journals, e-books, and d-collections (digitized historical collections) and are adding more content to the archive every day. Libraries and publishers experience benefits from day one and can be confident that they will have access to their most valued content in the future.

What Participants Say

“Our participation in Portico has been an important strategy in moving towards relying on electronic access in preference to print.”

Marilyn Fordyce, Information Resources Manager
University of Otago

Service for Libraries

  • Security—Portico offers libraries a permanent archive of e-journals, e-books, and d-collections, providing protection against the potential loss of access to e-literature integral to a library’s collection.
  • Coverage— Libraries benefit from preservation of a substantial and diverse range of content that is important to their users, whether e-journals, e-books, or d-collections.
  • Trigger Event Access—Participating libraries are provided with campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur, including when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other source.
  • Post-Cancellation Access—Portico also provides a reliable means to secure perpetual access when a participating publisher chooses to designate Portico as a provider of post-cancellation access.

Service for Publishers

  • Protection—The intellectual content of a publisher’s content is preserved in perpetuity and secure in a carefully managed archive.
  • Migration—Original source files of electronic journals are converted to an archival format. Portico assumes responsibility for future content migrations.
  • Publisher Access—Full access to a publisher’s content via a Portico web portal is provided. The Portico archive is open to a publisher’s complete list of scholarly e-journals and e-books and to some d-collections.

Benefits for Librarians

  • Freedom—Participating libraries are empowered to accelerate their transition to electronic resources without sacrificing future accessibility.
  • Savings—By participating in Portico, libraries enjoy reduced system-wide preservation costs that eliminate the need for each library to locally receive and archive electronic literature. With further reliance upon electronic resources, libraries reduce costs associated with print subscriptions, handling, and storage.
  • Mission Support—A relationship with Portico offers libraries practical means to act upon their traditional preservation mandate in support of the parent institution’s educational mission in cooperation with a trusted third-party partner.

Benefits for Publishers

  • Respond to Library Demand—Participating publishers are able to meet library demands for a trusted, reliable third-party archive. At the publishers’ request, Portico will facilitate provision of perpetual access.
  • Streamline Operations—Publishers are relieved of the obligation to convert source files to archival formats or to conduct future content or format migrations as technology changes.
  • Reduce Costs—Participation opens an opportunity to reduce or potentially eliminate current internal archiving activities and related costs

The Portico digital preservation service is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use
digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.