JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Membership in JSTOR is held by 7,000 institutions in 159 countries.

JSTOR was originally funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, but is now an independent, self-sustaining not-for-profit organization with offices in New York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan. In January 2009 JSTOR merged with ITHAKA becoming part of that organization.^[2] The latter is a non-profit organization founded in 2003 "dedicated to helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies."^[1]

History[link]

JSTOR was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. The founder, William G. Bowen, was the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988.^[3] Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals. By digitizing many journal titles, JSTOR allowed libraries to outsource the storage of these journals with the confidence that they would remain available for the long term. Online access and full-text search ability improved access dramatically. JSTOR originally encompassed ten economics and history journals and was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites. As of November 2010^[update], there were 6,425 participating libraries.^[4] JSTOR access was improved based on feedback from these sites and it became a fully searchable index accessible from any ordinary Web browser. Special software was put in place to make pictures and graphs clear and readable.^[5]

With the success of this limited project, Bowen and Kevin Guthrie, then-president of JSTOR, were interested in expanding the number of participating journals. They met with representatives of the Royal Society of London, and an agreement was made to digitize the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society back to its beginning in 1665. The work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000.^[5] As of November 2, 2010 (2010 -11-02)^[update], the database contained 1,289 journal titles in 20 collections representing 53 disciplines, and 303,294 individual journal issues, totaling over 38 million pages of text.^[4]

Usage and contents[link]

JSTOR is licensed mainly to libraries, universities, and publishers. Individual subscriptions are also available to certain journal titles through the journal publisher.

As of November 2010^[update], JSTOR material is provided by 692 publishers. More than 90 million searches of the archives were performed between January 1 and July 12, 2010.^[4] In addition to its use as an archive for individual journals, JSTOR has also been used as a resource for linguistics research to investigate trends in language use over time.^[6]

The availability of nearly all journals on JSTOR is controlled by a "moving wall", which is an agreed-upon delay between the current volume of the journal and the latest volume available on JSTOR. This time period is specified by agreement between JSTOR and the publisher and is usually 3–5 years. Publishers can request that the period of a "moving wall" be changed or request discontinuation of coverage. Formerly publishers could also request that the "moving wall" be changed to a "fixed wall" – a specified date after which JSTOR would not add new volumes to its database. As of November 2010^[update], "fixed wall" agreements were still in effect with three publishers of 29 journals made available online through sites controlled by the publishers.^[7]

In addition to the main site, JSTOR's labs group operates an open service that allows access to the contents of the archives for the purposes of corpus analysis at its Data for Research service.^[8] This site offers a search facility with graphical indication of the article coverage and loose integration into the main JSTOR site. Users can create focused sets of articles and then request a dataset containing word and n-gram frequencies and basic metadata. They are notified when the dataset is ready and can download it in either XML or CSV formats. The service does not offer full-text, though academics can request that from JSTOR subject to a non-disclosure agreement.

JSTOR Plant Science^[9] is available in addition to the main site. JSTOR Plant Science provides access to content such as plant type specimens, taxonomic structures, scientific literature, and related materials and aimed at those researching, teaching or studying botany, biology, ecology, environmental and conservation studies. The materials on JSTOR Plant Science are contributed through the Global Plants Initiative (GPI)^[10] and are accessible only to JSTOR and GPI members. Two partner networks are contributing to this: the African Plants Initiative which focuses on plants from Africa and the Latin American Plants Initiative which contributes plants from Latin America.

Register and Read: Limited free access in 2012[link]

In January 2012 JSTOR announced "Register and Read," a beta experiment. It will give at no charge limited access to all the articles in 70 journals that account for 18% of user demand. Registered guests will be able to read (but not download) three articles every two weeks.^[11]

Books[link]

In 2011 JSTOR announced the Books at JSTOR initiative, to be launched in the northern spring of 2012, of putting current and backlist books on line. Nine university presses are cooperating. The plan is to enable links to reviews and cited journal articles.^[12]

Controversy[link]

On July 19, 2011, internet activist Aaron Swartz was charged with data theft in relation to an alleged theft of academic journal articles from JSTOR.^[13] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR".^[14] Prosecutors in the case say Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.^[15] Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleaded not guilty to all counts and was released on $100,000 bail. Prosecution of the case is ongoing.^[16]

Two days later, on July 21, Greg Maxwell published a torrent file of a 32GB archive of 18,592 academic papers from JSTOR's Royal Society collection, via The Pirate Bay, in protest against Swartz' prosecution.^[17][18]

On September 7, JSTOR announced that they are releasing the public domain content of their archives (about 6% of the total) to the public.^[19] According to JSTOR, they have been working on making those archives public for some time, and the recent controversy made them "press ahead" with this initiative.^[19]

See also[link]

• List of academic databases and search engines
• Aluka
• ARTstor
• ArXiv
• Digital preservation
• Project MUSE

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Participating Institutions
• List of journals available on JSTOR