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Overview
Portico is a service of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA. Portico preserves digital publications such as e-journal articles, e-books, and digitized historical collections. Portico maintains that content in a "dark," or offline archive, to be made accessible to eligible libraries if and when the content becomes unavailable from its publisher. The purpose of Portico is to protect library and publisher investment in e-content by ensuring the long-term accessibility of that content to their communities.
Provider
Details
Subject Areas
Resource Types
Portico houses three types of content, ejournals, ebooks and D-Collections.
Portico’s E-Journal Preservation Service covers almost 12,000 committed titles. E-journals are made available to subscribers when a trigger even occurs. Portico’s e-Book Preservation Service holds nearly 66,000 committed titles.
Access to archived e-books and e-journals is provided when specific conditions or “trigger events” occur which causes titles to no longer be available from the publisher or a publisher-designated source. When e-journal and e-book titles have “triggered,” they are available to all participants in the Portico E-Book Preservation Service, regardless of whether the participating institution has previously licensed the content.
Portico also houses digitized historical collections called D-Collections. D-Collections contain primary sources, including newspapers, images, and other primary sources. The D-Collection Service preserves content on behalf of participating publishers. Currently there are three publishers participating; Adams Matthew, Gale and EBSCO. The service is paid for by publishers and should a trigger event occur, access will be limited to the publisher’s subscribed customers. Customers are not required to participate in Portico in order to gain access to this triggered content.
Full Text Linking
Portico has enabled OpenURL access to all preserved content. Libraries with OpenURL-based link resolvers can redirect patrons from discovery sites to the Portico archive. Citations and references will link to the named source via DOI if DOI information is included in the publishers source files.
Metadata Standards
The Portico archive is OAIS-compliant and has implemented METS and PREMIS concepts.
Search Options
Full-text searching is available.
Usage Statistics
Available to participating libraries upon request.
Authentication
IP adddress range.
Accessibility
The Portico website is designed with web standards and content organization that support "graceful degradation" (meaning the website will maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative) when accessed by different browsers and platforms. Portico is compliant with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act and W3C WAI Priorities 1 and 2 standards. The following is a list of accessibility features available on the Portico website.
- The website has been designed to function with voice browsers or voice-enabled web browsing software such as JAWS or text-based browsers such as Lynx.
- For users who want to customize the visual display of the site, the website layout collapses and enlarges when text size or screen resolution is increased or decreased without destroying the basic visual organization of the site. The site supports down to an 800 x 600 screen resolution.
- To increase ease of navigation in the site, tab ordering has been set on the links and form controls on the pages so that a user can navigate the site without using a mouse.
The Portico website will continue to be tested to ensure its accessibility and ease of use.
CRL Review
Collection Content
Portico is a repository of e-book and e-journal content and metadata from a wide variety of scholarly and scientific publishers. Portico also includes "D-Collections", which consist of digital files and metadata from a range of digitized historical and archival materials included in commercially published databases, such as those produced by Gale, Adam Matthew Digital, and EBSCO. As of January 2016 Portico had preserved in its archive an estimated 54.3 million e-journal articles representing over 22,000 titles;3.2 million ebooks from over 100 publishers; and over 540,000 "digitized historical items." Most of the journal content was from large journal publishers such as Elzevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.
Growth and diversification of Portico archived content over ten years, as reported by Portico in February 2016:
As of November 2015, EBSCO had committed 13 of its archive collections to Portico, including AAS Historical Periodicals and African American Historical Serials, although those had not yet been ingested. Gale had committed approximately 140 of its historical collections.
Portico accepts D-Collections content for newspaper collections in the aggregator's own proprietary formats, which can include zoning and other location metadata. It is not clear the extent to which the zoning and markup will be functional in the platform adopted by Portico to expose the archived content should a trigger event occur.
IIn September of 2018 Portico began hosting 70 Open Access e-journals formerly hosted through De Gruyter. These titles were originally published on an Open Access basis, and will remain Open Access through Portico. While the titles, as open access journals, were freely available before, now hosted by Portico they are gauranteed to be accessible for the long term.
Delivery
Because Portico is a "dark" archive, access to materials in the Portico repository is provided only in the event of a specified "trigger event.", Such events include: cessation of a publisher’s operations; discontinuation of a title by the publisher; back list titles are no longer offered by a publisher; or catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher’s delivery platform. When e-book and e-journal titles have “triggered,” they are available to all participants in the Portico E-Book Preservation Service, regardless of whether the participating institution has previously licensed the content. As of November 2015 Portico had provided access to more than twelve "triggered" titles. Delivery under such circumstances is via a platform comparable to ITHAKA's JSTOR platform.
Should such a trigger event occur for a D-Collection publisher, libraries having subscribed to or purchased the collection from the publisher will be eligible for continued access to the subscribed/purchased content through Portico. (The publisher provides Portico a list of eligible libraries annually for each of its products.) The eligible library would then pay Portico a yet undetermined fee for that access on an annual basis.
According to Portico, delivery under such circumstances would eventually be via a platform comparable to ITHAKA's JSTOR platform. Initially, access to the content with "baseline functionality" only is expected to be provided through the Portico audit platform. Page-turner functionality might not be available,and the delivery platform may not be able to exploit the markup and tagging of the content from the publisher's native system.Text-mining capabiltiies are envisioned eventually, but as a "sustainable service," i.e., most likely as an add-on feature.
As of November 2015, plans for the access and delivery services were still being formulated by Portico.
Terms
E-journals and e-books: Should a specified "trigger event" occur, access to content archived in Portico would be provided to all Portico participants (subscribers).
D-Collections: Should a specified "trigger event" occur, Portico is authorized to make content accessible only to libraries that had purchased or subscribed to that content from the publishers.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Portico preserves the contents of e-books, e-journals, and D-Collections in normalized formats, which may or may not preserve all functionality the content possessed in its original or native online publication environment. Portico preserves e-journal content in article format.
For libraries, participation in Portico is essentially an insurance policy: libraries pay an annual fee for participation but do not receive a tangible benefit until when and if a trigger event occurs.
Additional Reviews in Other Sources
Endnotes
Recording of the 2016 CRL webinar on Portico "Pursuing the 'Long Tail' of Elusive Publishers."
See the 2010 CRL audit report on Portico.
Community Ratings
Content scope and completeness
Cost and price-structure
Platform and user interface