In the comments to our SALT Announcement post, Paul Portner asks:

Do you have any ideas about how to make sure that published articles remain permanently available? (By “permanently”, I guess I mean however long today’s print journals are expected to last.) One advantage of the print model is that we can usually track down articles written long ago. Suppose the journal closes after — what, 5, 10, 25 years. Do you have any thoughts on how to make sure that the students in those times (especially those who may not be connected by personal relationships to somebody who downloaded it) can find the material?

We have been talking to the librarians at MIT and UT about many issues raised by a primarily electronic distribution format, and long-term preservation is one of the most important. As one might have expected, librarians have been thinking long and hard about issues of long-term preservation of electronic content for quite a while. So, following their recommendations, our plan is to not just have our content available on the server that hosts the journal (which may or may not be hosted by one of our libraries) but also deposit all articles to a repository which is specifically dedicated to long-term preservation. This may be DSpace or Portico, both of which librarians consider as “safe” for the long-term.