Portico is a new, not-for-profit electronic archiving service established in response to the library community's need for a robust, reliable means to preserve electronic scholarly journals. Portico was initiated by JSTOR and has been developed with the initial support of Ithaka, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Library of Congress. Portico's mission is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students.

The Need:
As scholars have become increasingly reliant upon the convenience and availability of electronic versions of scholarly journals, long term preservation of these resources has become a growing need. The recent endorsement by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and others of the statement "Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals" reflects the recognition that now is a crucial time for the library community to act in support of initiatives that will ensure enduring access to scholarly e-journals (www.arl.org/arl/pr/presvejrnloct05.html). Portico has been founded in response to this critical need.

Portico’s History:
Portico began as the Electronic-Archiving Initiative, a project launched by JSTOR in 2002 with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build upon the Foundation's seminal E-Journal Archiving Program. The charge of the Initiative was to build an infrastructure and economic model able to sustain an electronic journal archive. For more than two years, project staff worked on the development of technologies necessary to meet this charge and engaged in extensive discussions with publishers and libraries to craft an approach that balances the needs of both communities while generating sufficient funding for the archive. Through this iterative and collaborative process an electronic archiving service, now known as Portico, was developed and launched in 2005.

The Portico Service:
Content for the Portico archive comes directly from members of the scholarly publishing community who have agreed to contribute to the archiving service. The Portico archive is open to a publisher's complete list of scholarly journals. Contributing publishers supply source files to Portico ensuring preservation of the intellectual content of the journals, and Portico subjects the source files to a systematic normalization process that facilitates preservation and future migration. Portico provides all libraries supporting the archive with campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur and when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other sources.

Benefits to Libraries:
The Portico archive provides libraries with a practical means to act upon their traditional preservation mandate by offering a true safeguard against the potential loss of access to a vital aspect of their electronic collections. It is a means to secure perpetual access as well, if a contributing publisher chooses to designate Portico as a provider of post-cancellation access. With Portico, libraries can rely more heavily upon electronic resources and realize savings through reduced costs associated with print subscriptions, handling, and storage.

Additional information is available at www.portico.org.