JSTOR (pronounced JAY-stor; short for Journal Storage) is a digital library founded in 1995. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now also includes books and primary sources, and current issues of journals. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. More than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries have access to JSTOR; most access is by subscription, but some older public domain content is freely available to anyone. In 2012 JSTOR launched a program providing no-cost access to three items of older articles, for a period of fourteen days for individual scholars and researchers who register.
History
JSTOR's founder was William G. Bowen, the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988. JSTOR originally was conceived to be 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. 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 was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites, and originally encompassed ten economics and history journals. JSTOR access was improved based on feedback from its initial 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.
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.
JSTOR originally was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Until January 2009, it was an independent, self-sustaining nonprofit organization with offices in New York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then, JSTOR merged with the nonprofit Ithaka Harbors, Inc. Ithaka is a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 "dedicated to helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies."
Content
JSTOR content is provided by more than 900 publishers. The database contains more than 1,900 journal titles, in more than 50 disciplines.
In addition to the main site, the JSTOR 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. This site offers a search facility with graphical indication of the article coverage and loose integration into the main JSTOR site. Users may 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 may download it in either XML or CSV formats. The service does not offer full-text, although academics may request that from JSTOR, subject to a non-disclosure agreement.
JSTOR Plant Science 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) 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.
JSTOR launched its Books at JSTOR program in November 2012, adding 15,000 current and backlist books to its site. The books are linked with reviews and from citations in journal articles.
Access
JSTOR is licensed mainly to academic institutions, public libraries, research institutions, museums, and schools. More than 7,000 institutions in more than 150 countries have access. JSTOR has been running a pilot program of allowing subscribing institutions to provide access to their alumni, in addition to current students and staff. The Alumni Access Program officially launched in January 2013. Individual subscriptions also are available to certain journal titles through the journal publisher. Every year, JSTOR blocks 150 million attempts by non-subscribers to read articles.
Inquiries have been made about the possibility of making JSTOR open access. According to Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, JSTOR had been asked "how much would it cost to make this available to the whole world, how much would we need to pay you? The answer was $250 million".
Aaron Swartz incident
In late 2010 and early 2011, Internet activist Aaron Swartz used MIT's data network to bulk-download a substantial portion of JSTOR's collection of academic journal articles. When discovered, JSTOR stopped the download, and identified Swartz. Rather than pursue a civil lawsuit against him, in June 2011 it reached a settlement wherein he surrendered the downloaded data.
The following month, federal authorities charged Swartz with several "data theft"-related crimes, including wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. Prosecutors in the case claimed that Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.
Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleaded not guilty to all counts, and was released on $100,000 bail. In September 2012, U.S. attorneys increased the number of charges against Swartz from four to thirteen, with a possible penalty of 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. The case still was pending when Swartz committed suicide in January 2013.
Limitations
The availability of most 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 of the journal, which usually is three to five years. Publishers may request that the period of a "moving wall" be changed or request discontinuation of coverage. Formerly publishers also could request that the "moving wall" be changed to a "fixed wall"â€"a specified date after which JSTOR would not add new volumes to its database. As of November 2010, "fixed wall" agreements were still in effect with three publishers of 29 journals made available online through sites controlled by the publishers.
In 2010, JSTOR started adding current issues of certain journals through its Current Scholarship Program.
Increasing public access
Beginning September 6, 2011, JSTOR made public domain content freely available to the public. This "Early Journal Content" program constitutes about 6% of JSTOR's total content, and includes over 500,000 documents from more than 200 journals that were published before 1923 in the United States and, before 1870 in other countries. JSTOR stated that it had been working on making this material free for some time. The Swartz controversy and Greg Maxwell's protest torrent of some of the same content led JSTOR to "press ahead" with the initiative.
In January 2012, JSTOR started a pilot program, "Register & Read," offering limited no-cost access (not open access) to archived articles for individuals who register for the service. At the conclusion of the pilot, in January 2013, JSTOR expanded Register & Read from an initial 76 publishers to include about 1,200 journals from over 700 publishers. Registered readers may read up to three articles online every two weeks, but may not print or download PDFs.
JSTOR is conducting a pilot program with Wikipedia, whereby established editors are given reading privileges through the Wikipedia Library, as with a university library.
Use
In 2012, JSTOR users performed nearly 152 million searches, viewed more than 113 million articles, and downloaded more than 73.5 million articles. JSTOR has been used as a resource for linguistics research to investigate trends in language use over time and also to analyze gender differences in scholarly publishing.
See also
- List of academic databases and search engines
- Aaron Swartz#JSTOR
- Aluka
- ARTstor
- ArXiv
- Digital preservation
- Project MUSE
- Japanese Historical Text Initiative
- Wikipedia:JSTOR
References
Further reading
External links
- "JSTOR.org home page". JSTOR. .
- "Libraries and institutions offering access". JSTOR. . Searchable database, includes many public libraries offering free access to library card holders.
- "Register & Read". JSTOR. . Free individual registration, offering free read-only access (no printing or saving) to three articles every two weeks (seventy-eight per year).
- "Citation Locator". JSTOR. .
