Portico / NYSHEI Agreement Announcement

[August 7, 2006] NYSHEI is pleased to announce a partnership with Portico in which NYSHEI members who begin participation in Portico in 2006 or 2007, will be designated as a "Portico Archive Founder" and receive a further 5% reduction in the Annual Archive Support Fees (AASF):

• NYSHEI members that sign up in 2006, receive a 25% savings off the published AASF for five years, plus an additional 5% savings.
• NYSHEI members that sign up in 2007, receive a 10% savings off the published AASF for five years, plus an additional 5% savings.

Portico is a new, not-for-profit electronic archiving service established in response to the library community's need for a robust, reliable means to preserve electronic scholarly journals. Portico was initiated by JSTOR and has been developed with the initial support of Ithaka, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Library of Congress. 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.

Portico began in 2002 as JSTOR's Electronic-Archiving Initiative to build an infrastructure and economic model to sustain an electronic journal archive. Content for Portico comes directly from scholarly publishers who have agreed to supply source files. Portico subjects the source files to a systematic normalization process that facilitates preservation and future migration. Portico provides participants with campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur and when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other sources. These trigger events are: publisher ceases to publish a title; or publisher no longer offers back issues; or upon catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher's delivery platform.

Participation in Portico provides a means for NYSHEI members to act upon their traditional preservation mandate by offering a safeguard against the potential loss of access to electronic journal collections.

For more information on Portico, including the presentation at the June NYSHEI annual meeting, please use the NYSHEI website (http://nyshei.org/offers/portico.htm). For pricing tiers and additional information on Portico's archival approach, participating publishers, etc., please use the Portico site (http://www.portico.org).

To participate in Portico, please contact Portico directly indicating that you are a NYSHEI member. There are no thresholds for group participation.

Sharon Bonk, Interim Executive Director
NYSHEI