Re: Elsevier and Portico Sign Archive Partnership

["Eileen Fenton" <Eileen.Fenton@portico.org>]

Steve Hitchcock raised several questions about the nature of the 
relationship between Portico and Elsevier, and I thought it would be 
helpful to address those questions as well as to provide further 
background on Portico for those who are interested. Portico is a new 
nonprofit electronic archiving service initiated by JSTOR in response to 
the community's need for a robust, reliable means to preserve electronic 
scholarly journals.  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. As a 
collaborative enterprise, it is important for us to share with the 
community how we will fulfill our mission and to detail what economic, 
organizational and technical structures we have put in place. We believe, 
and Elsevier has indicated to us that they agree, that transparency on 
these issues is essential.

As a new collaborative effort Portico is securing support from all parties 
interested in the long-term availability of electronic journals, including 
publishers, libraries, government agencies and charitable foundations. As 
Karen Hunter said in her follow-up posting, publishers and libraries are 
both asked to pay fees to sustain the archive. Publishers make an annual 
payment which varies depending upon journal revenue (from subscriptions 
and advertising) and ranges from $250 to $75,000.  The details of the 
publisher contribution schedule are available on the Portico web site 
(www.portico.org/publishers.html), and all publisher commitments, 
including Elsevier's, follow this schedule.

Libraries also are expected to support the effort, as Portico provides a 
service that is consistent with libraries' preservation mandate. 
Participating libraries will sign an archiving license and make an annual 
financial contribution to cover the ongoing expense of maintaining the 
archive.  Library contributions are tiered according to total expenditures 
on library materials and are being finalized in consultation with the 
Portico Advisory Committee and other members of the library community 
(www.portico.org/about/advisory_committee.html). Final fees are expected 
to be announced very early in 2006 and will be posted to the website when 
they are finalized.

We are off to a great start in building this new collaboration.  To date 
seven publishers have committed more than 2,700 journals to the archive, 
libraries have expressed to us their support for the concept, and several 
organizations have contributed substantially to the funding of Portico's 
early development.  JSTOR, which initiated Portico, the Andrew W. Mellon 
Foundation, Ithaka, and the Library of Congress under the National Digital 
Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program have invested 
significantly in the preservation infrastructure and economic model which 
Portico has been developing over the last three years.

We look forward to continuing to build the collaborative effort. If you 
have further questions regarding Portico, please feel free to contact me 
directly or visit our website (www.portico.org <http://www.portico.org/>).

Eileen Fenton
Executive Director, Portico
eileen.fenton@portico.org