JSTOR
Originally conceived by William G. Bowen, President of the Foundation from 1988 to 2006, JSTOR's mission in the broadest sense is to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technologies. Since its incorporation in 1995, JSTOR has focused its efforts on building a trusted digital archive for scholarship. In building this archive, JSTOR has adopted a system-wide perspective, taking into account the sometimes conflicting needs of libraries, publishers, and scholars.
JSTOR's goals include the following:
- To build a reliable and comprehensive digital archive of important scholarly journal literature
- To improve dramatically access to these journals
- To help fill gaps in existing library collections of journal backfiles
- To address preservation issues such as mutilated pages and long-term deterioration of paper copy
- To reduce long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of journal collections
- To assist scholarly associations and publishers in making the transition to electronic modes of publication
- To study the impact of providing electronic access on the use of scholarly materials
Over the years, JSTOR has taken responsibility for the digital preservation of hundreds of scholarly journals. Older journal issues dating as early as 1665 are converted from print to digital form. JSTOR adds new issues annually either through digital conversion or, in the future, by working with its affiliate Portico, to ingest electronic versions directly from publishers. These materials are held in a centralized repository and made available to researchers for searching, browsing, viewing, and printing. For issues converted from print format, users can navigate the journal page-by-page, cover-to-cover, as if holding the original in their hands.
The JSTOR archive has been a tremendous success. With participation from more than 350 scholarly societies and other publishers, the archive includes the complete back runs of nearly 800 journal titles across over 40 disciplines. It has received project-specific grants from several foundations in addition to Mellon, and its operations are fully supported by close to 3,000 educational and research institutions worldwide.
Libraries have achieved savings on stack space, vastly improved access to journal content, and have found a viable solution for the problem of storing and preserving journals. Publishers and scholarly societies whose journals are available in JSTOR benefit from high-quality, no-cost digitization and preservation, increased access to their journals, and working collaboratively with JSTOR in serving their communities of scholars. Finally, JSTOR is being used by scholars and students in over 100 countries, and JSTOR is continuously exploring ways to reach even more users, particularly in developing nations.
Further information is available at www.jstor.org.
