In a recent editorial titled Act Now to Stop Millions of Research Papers from Disappearing, Nature’s editorial board has called on the global research community to urgently address the preservation of digital research, particularly focusing on at-risk publications. The article highlights the critical need for reliable long-term preservation strategies and underscores the role of services like Portico in safeguarding scholarly works.
Citing a 2024 study from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, which revealed that at least 2 million research articles are not being adequately preserved, Nature identified three key solutions: leveraging preservation services like Portico, using institutional repositories to store faculty articles, and implementing national legal deposit programs for preserving country-specific publications.
Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director of Portico, emphasized the importance of a collaborative approach to digital preservation. She noted that investing in collective infrastructure and leveraging expertise from across the community is essential for safeguarding research for future generations.
Portico currently preserves 40,000 journals, prioritizing small, independent, and open-access publications alongside works from commercial publishers, societies, and university presses. Additionally, Portico collaborates with legal deposit libraries, such as the British Library, which is tasked with preserving UK-originated content. Portico believes this model could be successfully adopted by other national libraries worldwide.
This call to action reflects a growing recognition of the vulnerability of digital research and the urgent need for sustainable preservation strategies.
Click here to read the original press release.
