New Long-Term Preservation Agreement for Portico and INFORMS

["List, Barry" <Barry.List@INFORMS.ORG>]

NEWS RELEASE

INFORMS and Portico Announce Long-Term Preservation Agreement

HANOVER, MD, February 25, 2009 - The Institute for Operations 
Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS(r)) today announced 
that it has signed an agreement with Portico, the electronic 
archiving service of Ithaka, Inc., to archive the association's 
12 scholarly journals.

"This agreement and INFORMS' electronic archive assure our 
subscribers that our journals will be available in perpetuity," 
says INFORMS Publications Director Patricia Shaffer. "Our 
institutional subscribers can take heart that electronic copies 
of our studies and journals will always be available, and that 
print copies will not be the only certain archival source."

The agreement follows the association's 2008 introduction of the 
INFORMS Journal Archive 1952-1997 for the association's 
institutional subscribers. The INFORMS Archive provides academic 
institutions with online access to 197 total volumes, 1,243 
issues, over 15,000 articles, and 177,000 pages covering 
operations research and its historical impact in its Journals 
Archive.

The new INFORMS/Portico agreement provides additional assurance 
to university and specialized libraries that INFORMS journals 
will remain accessible in the future. Under the terms of the 
agreement, the "dark archive" would provide access to INFORMS 
journals under four circumstances:

1. if INFORMS is no longer in business

2. if a publication is no longer offered

3. if back issues are no longer available

4. if INFORMS stopped publishing or providing journal access for 
more than 90 days.

INFORMS journals are strongly cited in their categories in 
Journal Citation Reports, the industry source. The special MBA 
issue published by BusinessWeek includes the flagship journals 
Operations Research and Management Science and two other INFORMS 
journals in its list of 20 top academic journals that are used to 
evaluate business school programs. Financial Times includes five 
INFORMS journals in its list of academic journals used to 
evaluate MBA programs.

About INFORMS

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences 
(INFORMS(r)) is an international scientific society with 10,000 
members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying 
scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, 
and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, 
and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as 
airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial 
engineering, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is 
www.informs.org <http://www.informs.org/> . More information 
about operations research is at www.scienceofbetter.org.

Barry List
Director, Communications
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
7240 Parkway Drive, Suite 300
Hanover, MD 21076
www.informs.org
Barry.List@INFORMS.ORG