News Release

Third archiving deal for Oxford Journals guarantees long term preservation of electronic content

Business Announcement

Oxford University Press UK

Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, has signed a key archiving agreement with Portico, an electronic archiving service launched in 2005 with funding from JSTOR, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, and The Library of Congress. The agreement assures robust long-term preservation and ongoing access to Oxford Journals electronic content.

This is the third major archiving agreement* that Oxford Journals is participating in, as part of their commitment to ensure long term accessibility to all journals content. In 2004, Oxford Journals became one of the first publishers to sign an archiving agreement with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, and in 2005 became a member of the LOCKSS preservation initiative from Stanford University. By signing this new agreement with Portico, Oxford Journals now have an enhanced ability to offer perpetual access, back-up archiving, and access facilities for all participating journals.

Martin Richardson, Managing Director of Oxford Journals, commented: "The agreement with Portico makes a firm statement to our customers and publishing partners that we are taking a responsible approach to digital archiving. We are committed to ensuring that access to our electronic content is safeguarded for the future.

"The agreement with Portico offers a further development to our archive provisions, by not only preserving an exact copy of journal content, but by also ensuring the usability of the archived content over time by migrating the files to future file formats as technology evolves. This approach of Portico is consistent with our strategy of establishing multiple, long-term preservation archives for our content, using a variety of different technologies."

"We are delighted that the Oxford Journals electronic content will be added to the Portico archive. As electronic journals have become a more and more important part of the scholarly record, robust, multi-layered archival arrangements have become an increasingly urgent requirement. We look forward to incorporating Oxford Journals content into Portico's active archive operations, and are pleased to serve as the secure repository of this portion of the scholarly record" said Eileen Fenton, Executive Director, Portico.

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* Oxford Journals is also currently participating with a further three initiatives, all in development: CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a two year pilot from the LOCKSS initiative, investigating a failsafe repository to ensure delivery of content in the event of a disaster; The British Library Legal Deposit E-Journal Pilot Project is currently testing the feasibility and technical requirements needed to store e-journal content on a legal deposit basis; and Oxford Journals is also participating in the Library of Congress Pilot Testing of Voluntary Copyright Deposits project.

Notes for Editors

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. For more information about Portico, please visit http://www.portico.org.

Oxford University Press (OUP), a department of the University of Oxford, is the world's largest and most international university press. Founded in 1478, it currently publishes more than 4,500 new books a year, has a presence in over fifty countries, and employs some 3,700 people worldwide. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing programme that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, children's books, materials for teaching English as a foreign language, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and journals. Read more about OUP

Oxford Journals, a Division of OUP, publishes over 180 journals covering a broad range of subject areas, two-thirds of which are published in collaboration with learned societies and other international organizations. The collection contains some of the world's most prestigious titles, including Nucleic Acids Research, JNCI (Journal of the National Cancer Institute), Brain, Human Reproduction, English Historical Review, and the Review of Financial Studies. Read more about Oxford Journals


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