ACS Safeguards Its Journal Content

The American Chemical Society has signed an agreement to preserve the content of its scholarly journals in a digital archive hosted by Portico, a nonprofit archiving service for publishers and libraries.

Portico is designed to ensure that digital scholarly literature remains accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students. Portico content is only accessible through libraries in the event that other journal content retrieval methods are not available. The service is backed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Library of Congress; the journal-archiving organization JSTOR; and Ithaka Harbors, an organization that encourages the use of information technology in education. More than 30 publishers, including Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons, have placed journal content in the Portico archive.

The Portico archive complements ACS's own electronic journal archive. The society further ensured the sustainability of its digital journal content by joining CLOCKSS, the Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe program, last spring. Libraries involved in the program are developing a geographically distributed digital archive of participating publishers' journal content. As with Portico, CLOCKSS content will be made available only in case of a catastrophic event or other long-term business interruption that prevents a publisher from making its material available itself.