Portico highlighted in Nature’s Call for Action to Preserve Digital Research
In Act now to stop millions of research papers from disappearing, Nature’s editorial board calls on the global research community to take steps to better preserve the growing number of research papers being produced each year, with a particular focus on at-risk publications.
Citing a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication that says at least 2 million research articles are not being preserved, the editorial highlights three ways to help address the challenge. It emphasizes the importance of active preservation with services like Portico, highlights the role that institutional repositories can play in maintaining copies of faculty articles, and posits that national legal deposit programs can help to preserve content published in specific countries.
Reflecting on the challenges and proposed solutions, Kate Wittenberg, Portico Managing Director, notes that all of these approaches to digital preservation are critical and that working together as a community to invest in and leverage expertise and infrastructure is essential.
“Digital preservation is complex and multifaceted, and the task is getting larger every day,” said Wittenberg. “Organizations engaged in this work must continue to work together to preserve as much material as possible, including prioritizing at-risk content, and to draw on one another’s expertise to ensure we maintain a global network of affordable, secure, persistent archives that capture research as it is published.”
Portico preserves 40,000 journals today and has prioritized preserving small, independent and often open access publications alongside a wide range of commercial, society, and university press publishers. Portico also provides preservation services to support the work of legal deposit libraries like the British Library which is mandated to preserve publications originating within the UK. This is a model that Portico believes may work well for other national libraries.
“Portico works directly with many publishers, but we cannot do it all. Our work to enable libraries around the world to leverage our expertise and systems to support their local preservation efforts is critical,” explained Wittenberg. “The reality is that no single organization can tackle the growing amount of content in need of preservation, whether research articles or other material. and libraries have the mission, mandate, and proximity to support digital preservation of local content whether that is at the national or university level. We hope that by providing services to help them to do this, we can keep the overall system-wide costs lower while collectively preserving more material.”