October 31, 2002 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A nonprofit organization in New York that was founded in 1995 to help college and university libraries deal with a space crunch in the stacks has expanded access to scholarly journals both in the United States and abroad.
JSTOR, which got its start as a project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in New York, has built an online archive of 218 scholarly journals in 24 disciplines. The journals are divided into six collections, such as arts and sciences, business, and ecology and botany. Each journal’s back issues have been converted into a searchable digital format.
Libraries that subscribe to one or more of the collections are able to cut back on the amount of shelf space they devote to back issues of journals. In addition, JSTOR has made the journals more accessible to researchers, increased their use, and opened up new possibilities for interdisciplinary research, according to Bruce Heterick, director of library relations at JSTOR.
One journal in the general science collection, Philosophical Transactions, published by the Royal Society in London, dates back to 1665. Before JSTOR, the complete run of the journal was available only in paper in three or four libraries around the world. Now the journal, including rare — and fragile — early issues, is available to anyone at an institution that subscribes to JSTOR’s science collection.
More readily available titles are easier for scholars to locate now that they don’t have to worry that someone else is using the issue they need or that an issue was misplaced the last time it was returned to the stacks.
JSTOR also encourages cross-disciplinary research.
“You might be searching for something in economics, but you have the ability to search journals in statistics or in history that through serendipity might just bring things to your attention that you have never thought about,” says Mr. Heterick.
The archive does not include current issues of journals. When JSTOR negotiates with publishers for the rights necessary to include their journals in the archive, publishers determine a set period of time — usually three to five years — before new issues can be added to JSTOR.
Colleges and universities make up the vast majority of JSTOR’s participants, although a number of government agencies, national banks, and public libraries also subscribe. For each collection to which participants subscribe, they pay both a one-time archive fee for the long-term costs of maintaining the collection, and a smaller annual fee that covers short-term costs, such as adding new issues and providing user support.
JSTOR has worked with a number of foundations to provide access to the archive to foreign colleges and universities that would not otherwise be able to afford the service. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, has given JSTOR $422,000 to provide the archives to 23 colleges and universities in the former Soviet Union. The Mellon Foundation gave $340,000 to Sabinet, an association of libraries in South Africa, to provide access to the archive to 17 universities, as well as the National Library of South Africa. Another Mellon grant of $180,000 covers participation fees for seven institutions in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia.
Other foundation grants have paid for JSTOR at universities in Greece, Ireland, Israel, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
To get there: Go to http://www.jstor.org.
