New services for academic, research, and cultural institutions to share, preserve, and manage digital collections – ITHAKA

“ITHAKA announced today a new set of services to help academic, research, and cultural institutions easily and affordably share, preserve, and manage their local digital collections. Using the same infrastructure that powers ITHAKA’s nonprofit services JSTOR and Portico, institutions can now increase the reach and usefulness of their local digital collections, secure access for generations to come, and further the mission they share with one another and ITHAKA to improve access to knowledge worldwide.

“Research and learning increasingly take place online, so institutions need solutions that align their local collections to digital workflows, are interoperable with a variety of tools, and are actively preserved as technology advances,” said Bruce Heterick, VP, Open Collections & Infrastructure at ITHAKA. “We created JSTOR and Portico to do exactly this for more than 100,000 journals and books held by libraries, and are excited to extend the use of this infrastructure to help institutions get their local digital collections more effectively into existing research and teaching workflows affordably, efficiently, and at scale.”

Following a successful series of pilots during which over 300 institutions shared more than 1,800 collections on JSTOR, and a cohort of 40 partners helped to define preservation and collection loading needs, ITHAKA developed three services to support institutions of all sizes looking for high-impact, sustainable solutions. …”

Portico access alert: BMJ Simulation & Technology Enhanced Learning – Portico

“Portico is now providing access to content from the journal BMJ Simulation & Technology Enhanced Learning. This title contributed to research in the use of simulation and innovative technology across the health and social care professions in order to improve clinical outcomes, safety, and patient experiences.

BMJ Simulation & Technology Enhanced Learning ceased publication in July 2021 and is no longer available through the publisher; therefore, it has “triggered” and is now freely available to the community via the Portico archive. While it was originally published as a hybrid journal with some Open Access articles, the publisher has authorized us to make the full journal available on an Open Access basis.”

Partnering with publishers to break down barriers to preserving new forms of scholarship – Digital Preservation Coalition

“NYU Libraries initiated a project, in partnership with Portico, CLOCKSS, and five university presses that aimed to better understand the limits of current preservation approaches when applied to new forms of scholarly publication. The project, which I described in a previous blog post, focused on a diverse selection of open access monograph-like publications with features that made them more complex to preserve than traditional text-and-image publications. …”

NASIG – Open Access Content Under Threat: Internet Archive and Portico

“With disruptions in print supply chains and cutbacks on server and staff support, the threat of unpreserved content disappearing is greater than ever. Join us for an informational overview and deep dive into how technology is being used to preserve websites and their underlying content. Stephanie Orphan, Director of Content Preservation for Portico will discuss the preservation service’s efforts to preserve OA content and successes in providing access to it when it disappears. Jefferson Bailey, Director, Web Archiving and Data Services at Internet Archive will provide an update on Internet Archive Scholar and its efforts to ensure at risk content remains available.

In 2018, the Internet Archive undertook a large-scale project to build as complete a collection as possible of scholarly outputs published on the web, as well as improve the discoverability and accessibility of scholarly works archived as part of these global web harvests. This project involved a number of areas of work: targeted archiving of known OA publications (especially at-risk “long tail” publications), extraction and augmentation of bibliographic metadata and full text, integration and preservation of related identifier, registry, and aggregation services and datastores, partnerships with affiliated initiatives and joint service developments, and creation of new tools and machine learning approaches for identifying archived scholarly work in existing global scale born-digital and web collections. The project also identifies and archives associated research outputs such as blogs, datasets, code repos, and other secondary research objects. The alpha public interface, not yet officially announced, can be found at https://scholar-qa.archive.org/ and the testing and catalog temporarily hosted at https://fatcat.wiki/. Portico has long been preserving OA content and is currently preserving more than 5,000 OA journals from 309 publishers. They currently provide access to 114 of these OA journals, which were otherwise no longer available online for use by researchers (these are referred to as triggered titles). Portico is actively exploring methods of preserving more of the most vulnerable scholarly content and seeking input from the community on this topic. Whether you are a digital preservation expert or new to the scene, this session will offer something for you.”

Preserving Open Access and other at-risk scholarly content – Portico

“Recent research has demonstrated that dozens of online-only Open Access journals are no longer available, while hundreds of others are inactive and at risk of being lost. Important scholarship may be lost to future generations of researchers if there is no preservation plan in place.

At Portico, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to preserve the scholarly record, we work with publishers and libraries to ensure that academic content remains accessible and usable for the long term. Currently, we are preserving more than 5,000 Open Access journals from 309 publishers. We have triggered and provide public access to 114 OA journals that are no longer available through other digital platforms. This content remains available to everyone on an Open Access basis after being triggered on Portico….”

Portico announces the trigger of 3 Open Access titles from Veruscript

“I’m pleased to share the news that the Portico archive now hosts the content from three open access e-journals published by Veruscript: Cambridge Journal of Eurasian Studies, Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies, and Veruscript Functional Nanomaterials.

Veruscript ceased operations in May 2019 and these three journals were no longer hosted by any online platform; therefore, they have “triggered” and are available to the community via the Portico archive. These titles were originally published under an open access license, and will remain open access through Portico….”

What Happens When Science Just Disappears? | WIRED

“KAY DICKERSIN KNEW she was leaping to the front lines of scholarly publication when she joined The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. Scientific print-publishing was—and still is—slow and cumbersome, and reading its results sometimes required researchers to go to the library. But as associate editor at this electronic peer-reviewed journal—one of the very first, launched in the summer of 1992—Dickersin was poised to help bring scientists into the new digital age. Dickersin, an epidemiologist, acted as an associate editor, helping researchers publish their work. But the OJCCT was a bit ahead of its time. The journal was sold in 1994 to a publisher that eventually became part of Taylor & Francis, and which stopped the e-presses just a couple years later. And after that happened, its papers—reports, reviews, and meta-analysis of clinical trials—all disappeared. Dickersin wasn’t just sad to lose her editing gig: She was dismayed that the scientific community was losing those archives. “One of my important studies was in there,” she says, “and no one could get it.” Couldn’t, that is, until Dickersin decided to go spelunking for science. For more than a decade, Dickersin’s paper was missing along with about 80 others. Sometimes, the ex-editors would try to find out who had the rights to the articles, whether they could just take copies and put them on their own website. “We don’t want to do that,” they’d always conclude. “We don’t want to get in trouble.” Finally, Dickersin went to the librarians at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a professor, for help—and that’s how she found Portico. Portico is like a Wayback Machine for scholarly publications. The digital preservation service ingests, meta-tags, preserves, manages, and updates content for publishers and libraries, and then provides access to those archives. The company soon signed on to the project and got permission from Taylor & Francis to make the future archives open-access….”

Portico now providing access to two Sage Publications’ titles – Portico

“Portico has made the content from two Open Access journals previously published by Sage Publications available through the Portico archive. The titles that have triggered are: Human Genomics and Proteomics and Journal of Dental Biomechanics.

The content for the volumes and issues listed below is no longer available through any online platform; therefore, it has “triggered” and is available via the Portico archive. These titles were published Open Access by Sage and will remain Open Access through Portico….”

Portico and Open Access Week – Portico

“In response to shifting community needs, Portico began to work with publishers to offer OA triggers for titles published OA in 2014. In January 2014, Portico had its first open access trigger, Astronomy Education Review (formerly published by the American Astronomical Society). Since that time, Portico has signed 30 new publishers onto agreements that allow for OA triggers and has been working on modifying agreements with publishers participating in Portico who offer OA content. Titles not published OA will continue to trigger only for libraries participating in Portico.

We are also working with CHORUS to ensure the ongoing OA availability of articles funded by federal agencies that are published by publishers participating in Portico….”