“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:
- if INFORMS is no longer in business
- if a publication is no longer offered
- if back issues are no longer available
- 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®) 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. More information about operations research is at www.scienceofbetter.org.