JSTOR

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JSTOR Online Image at [1]

JSTOR (Journal Storage, founded 1995) is an online system for archiving academic journals. It provides full-text searches of digitized (scanned) back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions. Originally funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR is now an independent, self-sustaining, not-for-profit organization with offices in New York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

History

JSTOR was conceived by William G. Bowen 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. Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals in terms of cost and space. 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. Ten additional sites were added in the spring of 1996. JSTOR access was improved based on feedback from these sites. It became a complete and fully searchable index accessible from an ordinary 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 hammered out to digitize the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society all the way back to its beginning in 1665. The work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December of 2000. As of December 2006, the database contains 669 journal titles and over 154,000 individual journal issues, totaling over 22 million pages of text.

Usage and contents

JSTOR access is licensed mainly to libraries, universities and publishers in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland. Participating libraries make JSTOR available to library members free of charge through the Internet. Individual subscriptions are also available to certain journal titles through the journal publisher. As of April 2007, material for JSTOR is provided by 431 publishers. The archive has nearly 3500 participants who provide access to the academic journals. Nearly 35 million searches of the archives were performed from January to April of 2007. In addition to its use as an archive for individual journals, JSTOR has also been used as part of research methodology. The breadth of material in the archive makes it useful in investigating trends in linguistics over time.

The availability of many journals on JSTOR is controlled by a "moving wall", a delay between the current volume of the journal and the current volume available on JSTOR. This time period is specified in an agreement between JSTOR and the publisher and is usually around three to five years. Publishers can request that the period of a "moving wall" be changed, request discontinuation of coverage, or request that the "moving wall" be changed to a "fixed wall". A "fixed wall" is a specified date after which JSTOR is not allowed to add new volumes into their database. A "fixed wall" is usually arranged when a publisher makes its articles available online through a site controlled by the publisher.

Related projects

In 2005, after the closure of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO)—an online system for images of artworks set up by a Getty Foundation-led consortium of institutions—ARTstor was set up as a sister organization to JSTOR to do the same job, using a similar subscription model. It has gained the use of many existing image databases, and has digitized for the first time The Illustrated Bartsch, the largest catalogue for old master prints. It reached a total of 500,000 images in 2006. With two exceptions in London, listed subscribers are all in the US and Canada.

See also

• Serials crisis
• List of academic databases and search engines
• Digital preservation
• open access journal
• Project MUSE

References

• Roger C. Schonfeld, JSTOR: A History, Princeton University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-691-11531-1

Further reading

• Seeds, Robert S. (2002). "Impact of a digital archive (JSTOR) on print collection use". Collection Building. 21 (3): 120–122. doi:10.1108/01604950210434551. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Gauger, Barbara J. (2006). "JSTOR usage data and what it can tell us about ourselves: is there predictability based on historical use by libraries of similar size?". OCLC Systems & Services. 22 (1): 43–55. doi:10.1108/10650750610640801.
• Articles about JSTOR

External links

• JSTOR - Homepage.
• JSTOR -UK/IRE - participating institutions in the UK and Ireland