Now journals using Scholastica Open Access Publishing can have their articles automatically deposited into the Portico digital preservation service - get the details below!
One of the most important steps that online journals should take to ensure that readers will always have access to their scholarship, even if the journal is discontinued or its website is compromised, is to deposit all articles into a digital preservation service. Creating the XML and properly organizing and naming content files so that they are formatted for ingestion by preservation services can be time consuming and require technical knowledge that many journal editors and publishers don’t have. At Scholastica, we’re working to help academic journals automate recurring publishing steps with ease. In order to help journals preserve their content, we’ve made it possible for those using Scholastica’s Open Access Publishing software to have their articles automatically deposited into the Portico digital archive.
Now, journals that use Portico can request to have their Scholastica and Portico accounts connected so that all of the articles they publish via Scholastica are deposited into Portico. Any time journals update an article Scholastica will also automatically deposit the new version into Portico, so the archive always has the latest content. Scholastica takes care of formatting articles for ingestion into Portico, so your journal’s content will be added to the archive with no work on the part of your editors.
If you’re not yet using Portico, you can learn how to sign up for an account on their website. Once you’ve signed up for Portico, just follow the steps in this help doc to set up automated Portico deposits through Scholastica. It’s fast and easy! Since our imports have already been tested, any publisher hosting journals on Scholastica can sign an agreement with Portico without having to go through a content sample review process - so you can start archiving your articles quicker!
In the interview below Stephanie Orphan, Director of Publisher Relations at Portico, shares some details about how Portico’s preservation service works and the key benefits of digital preservation for journals.
Q&A with Stephanie Orphan
Can you give a brief overview of Portico for those unfamiliar with it and explain what your preservation approach is?
SO: Portico is a community-supported digital preservation service for e-journals, e-books and other digital scholarly content. Through Portico participation, scholarly publishers and academic libraries are ensuring the long-term preservation of the digital materials that they produce and use. Portico has a hands-on, migration-based approach to preservation. We analyze the content supplied to us by publishers, develop a preservation plan for the publisher and write tools that allow us to properly package the content for preservation purposes and conduct an initial migration of the metadata into
a common format. We then preserve in the archive all of the files we received from the publisher as well as any we created through our processes. We are committed to conducting further content migrations in the future when necessary.
While Portico is primarily concerned with the long-term curation and care of the content preserved in its archive, ultimately, we are able to provide access to content if a publisher (or its successor) is no longer doing so. When scholarly content that was once available online is no longer hosted and available, Portico considers this to be a “trigger event” that requires us to provide access from the archive. For subscription content, Portico’s 1,000+ participating libraries will gain access if there is a trigger event; for Open Access titles, the content will be made freely available to all.
Why is digital preservation so important for academic journals?
SO: Scholars and the libraries that support journals depend on ongoing access to scholarly journals as a vital part of the research and education process. While e-journals allow for increased ease of access to content, they also require that the libraries relying on them give up physical control of the content. Given this, long-term preservation of and continued access to e-journals has been a concern of the library community ever since they began investing in online content. The need for digital preservation is even more important now as increasingly journals are e-only. When publishers take steps to ensure that their e-journal content is being preserved by a third party, such as Portico, they contribute to the peace of mind of the library community by removing the worry that their content may some day no longer be available for use.
What makes Portico one of the leading digital preservation services in the world?
SO: Portico is recognized internationally as a knowledgeable and successful digital preservation service, having made significant strides in preserving scholarly content over the past 15 years. This is reflected in our high levels of participation from the library and publishing community. There are currently more than 1,000 libraries and nearly 600 publishers around the world who participate in Portico. In addition to the vast amount of content we are preserving (1.6 billion files comprising 102 million archival units [journal articles, e-books, or documents]), Portico contributes to the greater preservation community by sharing research, participating in working groups, and contributing expertise.
How does Portico collaborate with the academic community?
SO: Portico has been deeply engaged with the academic community since its inception, and our core preservation services were developed based on the needs expressed by the community. Over the years, not only has content become more sophisticated, but technology allows researchers to take more complex actions on it. As part of our ongoing collaboration with the academic community, Portico is currently investigating, along with HATHI Trust and JSTOR, the feasibility of developing a single-source text and data mining service for researchers to help meet their current and future needs. We are also talking to libraries about ways in which we can work with them to preserve library created content that goes beyond hosted journals and e-books. In addition, to help further the conversation about digital preservation, this year Portico sponsored registration for underrepresented students and first-time attendees at the iPRES conference as well as leading a workshop and hosting a panel at the conference. These are just a few examples of the ways in which we work with the academic community.
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