How an Academic Archive Became a Tech Juggernaut

Kevin Guthrie has been a nonprofit leader for more than 30 years. But when he describes the strategic evolution of his organization, JSTOR — which specializes in academic archiving — he sounds almost like a Silicon Valley CEO.

Take JSTOR’s first $700,000 in seed money, which came from the Andrew Mellon Foundation in 1994. That resembled a venture capitalist’s early support, Guthrie says. Other foundations, such as Sloan, Howard Hughes, and MacArthur, pitched in later, too. Or consider the nonprofit’s rapid growth in its first decade. That happened “because of the combination of digitization and networks,” he adds. Even today, JSTOR can’t stand still. “You have to continuously be trying to add more value. Technology is dynamic; it’s not just something that happens once.”

For professors, graduate students, and 14,000 academic-library customers around the globe, JSTOR has become a vital source of scholarly, peer-reviewed information. Its internet-based collections provide back issues of 2,800 academic journals, blending mainstays such as Science and Foreign Affairs with niche publications such as the Condor and Journal of Biblical Literature. Each year, JSTOR handles more than 120 million queries worldwide. “It’s an extraordinary resource,” says Barbara Rockenbach, university librarian at Yale.

After scrambling for cash in its early years, JSTOR has built the sturdy financial footing that the research community wants to see to reassure it that the service will be here for the long haul. In 2023, the most recent year for which informational tax returns are available, JSTOR booked $88.9 million in program revenue, chiefly library subscriptions. JSTOR is by far the largest operating division within its parent organization, Ithaka Harbors, which had total expenses of more than $110 million and revenue of $106 million. Even after allowing for future obligations to subscribers, Ithaka has net cash reserves of $165 million.

With the information sector being rocked by artificial intelligence, open-source publishing, and other factors, JSTOR can’t rest on its laurels. That’s fine with the nonprofit’s leadership, which is dipping into reserves to build new services in areas related to technology’s latest trends. Stopping just short of Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for “disruption,” Guthrie declares that “we need to be continuously challenging ourselves to innovate and to keep moving with the world as it evolves.”

Such new work will remain consistent with JSTOR’s mission of protecting the long-term stewardship of scholarly materials, Guthrie adds, while also tapping into JSTOR’s nimble culture: listening to users, embracing their ideas, and relying far more on earned revenue than on philanthropic support.

With 14,000 library customers around the world, JSTOR’s economies of scale let it keep fees relatively modest. Yale, one of its largest customers, pays about $141,000 a year for all JSTOR services, Rockenbach says. Fees for most specific journal packages haven’t budged in a decade or longer. “Compared to the other vendors we deal with,” says Alicia Salaz, university librarian at the University of Oregon, JSTOR’s services “are priced fairly, and they’re using the revenue to make those services and products better.”

The stakes are especially high today, says John Sherer, head of the University of North Carolina Press, because “the growth of bad information on the internet is happening faster than the growth of good information. It’s already terrible, and it’s going to get more terrible.” Sherer says he hopes JSTOR “will be in the catbird seat, because they’ve gone to all this trouble to collect meticulous, peer-reviewed information.”

Energy, Negotiating Skills, and Optimism

In the early 1990s, Mellon Foundation president William Bowen sensed a crisis in the making. He knew — from his prior role as Princeton University’s president — that major universities’ libraries would soon run out of shelf space to store all the current and back copies of scholarly journals they were expected to keep. Some new form of digital storage was needed.

As researcher Roger Schonfeld later observed in a book about JSTOR’s early years, Bowen and his Mellon colleagues briefly thought that CD-ROMs might be the best new storage form. But embracing the internet soon became the obvious choice.

In August 1994, the Mellon Foundation invited librarians at the University of Michigan to apply for a $700,000 grant called “Development of a Digital Library in Support of the Humanities.” The winning applicants — who pitched their project as JSTOR (for “journal storage”) — started small, aiming to digitize back issues of 10 academic journals in economics and history. They weren’t sure whether they should scrape images from microfilm or hire a crew in Barbados to scan one page at a time.

The project’s potential became clear quickly, and in July 1995, JSTOR was spun out of Michigan with 33-year-old Guthrie stepping in as president.

Guthrie arrived with an eclectic career that included stints in sports management, nonprofit research, and even a brief attempt to play pro football. He brought a combination of energy, negotiating skills, and optimism that helped him succeed in his new role, according to those who worked with him in the 1990s.

Throughout JSTOR’s first decade, philanthropists, led by Mellon, provided steady support. From 1994 through 2001, Mellon made eight grants to JSTOR, totaling about $10 million supporting everything from short-term cash needs to a buildout of journal collections focused on ecology and demography. Mellon also made five grants to groups acting on behalf of historically black colleges and universities, South African universities, and other potential JSTOR customers, making it easier for them to sign up for this new resource.

“You can get rivalries in the foundation community where people don’t want to support someone else’s project,” Guthrie says. “But Mellon made introductions so that other foundations came and supported more collections.” The Howard Hughes Medical Institute helped JSTOR build its science-journal collection. The MacArthur Foundation helped fund outreach to libraries in the former Soviet Union.

In 1997, JSTOR was ready to start seeking customers for its first product: a digital back-issues suite of scholarly journals in history and economics. JSTOR board member Richard De Gennaro, a former Harvard library director, called dozens of his peers at big universities and pitched them on this new offering. Borrowing a page from the “act now!” playbook of top corporate sales people, JSTOR offered discounts if customers signed up early. JSTOR also catered to smaller colleges by charging them less.,

“As we got closer to the deadline, it was really exciting; all these libraries were asking about it,” Guthrie recalled. More than 250 libraries, far ahead of expectations, signed up before the first deadline.

A Sturdy Business Model

Over the next 15 years, JSTOR ramped up a dozen more suites of humanities journals, as well as similar bundles of science journals. To assuage journals’ fears of undercutting their revenue, JSTOR generally offered access only to journal articles that were at least three years old. Newer articles had to be obtained from the publishers.

A few elite publications, such as Science, balked for a while at handing over what they regarded as valuable back-issue rights. Other periodicals, such as Nature, still aren’t readily available. But most others felt the burden of maintaining back-issue access on their own was greater than the potential rewards. JSTOR does pay licensing fees to individual publishers; in 2023, those licensing fees totaled $19 million — a little more than 20 percent of earned revenue.

In its early years, JSTOR shored up its financial viability by asking major libraries to pay a one-time fee — equal to several years of journal-access charges — when they signed on. That money went into a JSTOR reserve account, which helped assure libraries that this new service would be around for a long time, avoiding financial upheaval that could backfire on scholars who might come to rely on JSTOR to get their work done.

In 2009, JSTOR merged with Ithaka Harbors, then a smaller nonprofit, which provides nonprofit consulting through its Ithaka S&R division, as well as digital document preservation through its Portico unit. Guthrie became president of the combined entity and took the Ithaka name.

JSTOR’s revenue model has proven so sturdy that a private equity firm approached Guthrie some years ago to ask if he would consider selling the business. Other nonprofits that focused on education and digital information — such as edX and the ACT testing service — have agreed to be acquired by for-profit companies. But both Guthrie and the JSTOR board said no. “We’ve always been very committed to the mission,” Guthrie says.

Using Reserves to Prepare for the Future

Over the past decade, Ithaka’s revenue has often exceeded its expenses, allowing it to build up hefty reserves. But now the group is tapping into those funds to help it address new challenges. In 2023, it ran a deficit of about $11 million. Without disclosing exact figures, he acknowledges that JSTOR continued to run operating deficits in 2024 and the first part of 2025. That’s appropriate, he asserted, because some of those reserves are, in effect, an R&D fund as needed.

“We’ve got to keep growing,” Guthrie explains., especially because while libraries continue to cherish JSTOR’s back copies of research journals, there aren’t many more journals — or libraries — left to be plugged in to JSTOR’s offerings. In development now at JSTOR are ways of using AI to build better labels (known as “meta-tags”) that will help scholars find specific sections within large documents that are most relevant to their research needs. There’s also interest in having JSTOR become an important way that individual universities share their unique document collections on the web.

In addition, JSTOR is developing a hybrid way for university presses to publish monographs that can earn digital royalties for a few years before becoming available, for free, to anyone interested. This approach could be very helpful to university presses that are struggling to keep revenue sources alive in the face of a massive cultural shift toward making information free, says UNC Press’s John Sherer.

“These are big projects that can feel heavy for the organization,” Guthrie says. “But we’re comfortable running a deficit to invest in new, mission-based opportunities. You have to be continually trying to add more value. That’s our DNA. After all, we exist because of a technological transformation.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.