Digital Archives: Trigger? Happy!

Cindy Hepfer (Head, Electronic Periodicals Management Dept., Central Technical Services, University at Buffalo) reports a success story in world of digital journal access:

In 2006, the University Libraries joined Portico, a service launched in 2002 by JSTOR as its "Electronic-Archiving Initiative." Portico's mission is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and ensure that the materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students.

Initially funded by JSTOR, the Library of Congress, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Portico now has 395 library members which use the service as one component of their digital preservation strategy. Portico archives the content of nearly 50 scholarly publishers including Annual Reviews, Cambridge University Press, Duke University Press, Elsevier, IEEE, John Wiley, Nature, Oxford University Press, Sage, Springer and Taylor and Francis -- to date the archive has "ingested" more than 3,034,345 articles.

Access to content in Portico was originally designed to be made available only under certain conditions called "trigger events." Trigger events include: a publisher stopping operations, a publisher ceasing to publish a title, a publisher no longer offering back issues, or catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher's delivery platform. If these conditions were to occur, Portico would then "light up" its archive for campus-wide access to member libraries. Now, however, several participating publishers have indicated that they will also allow Portico to enable secure post-cancellation access to member libraries....

The journal that was triggered is one that the UB Libraries had not subscribed to: Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation. Graft was published by SAGE Publications from January 2001 to March 2003. The journal will be removed from the Sage website at the end of 2007. Because Sage Publications, which is a leading international publisher of electronic media, journals and books, had ensured that Graft would be preserved in the Portico archive and because the journal will not be offered by any other commercial online source, Portico is "lighting up" the volumes currently found on the Sage website in the Portico archive and will provide access to literature that otherwise would be lost to the scholarly community. Through this first trigger event, Portico demonstrates how publishers, archives, and libraries can cooperatively provide a permanent archive of scholarly literature published in electronic form and avoid a permanent gap in the scholarly record.

A few publishers of legal and law-related materials participate in Portico: Berkeley Electronic Press, Cambridge University Press, Duke University Press, Haworth Press, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis Group, University of California Press, University of Chicago Press. The alert reader will, however, note the absence of some of the leading law publishers.