JSTOR

JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals.

, more than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries had access to JSTOR. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.

JSTOR's revenue was $86 million in 2015.

History

William G. Bowen, president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988, founded JSTOR in 1994. JSTOR was originally conceived 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 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 journals with the confidence that they would remain available long-term. Online access and full-text searchability improved access dramatically.

Bowen initially considered using CD-ROMs for distribution. However, Ira Fuchs, Princeton University's vice president for Computing and Information Technology, convinced Bowen that CD-ROM was becoming an increasingly outdated technology and that network distribution could eliminate redundancy and increase accessibility. (For example, all Princeton's administrative and academic buildings were networked by 1989; the student dormitory network was completed in 1994; and campus networks like the one at Princeton were, in turn, linked to larger networks such as BITNET and the Internet.) JSTOR was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites, and originally encompassed ten economics and history journals. JSTOR access 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, the then-president of JSTOR, wanted to expand 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'' dating from its beginning in 1665. The work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000. In 1999 JSTOR started a partnership with Joint Information Systems Committee and created a mirror website at the University of Manchester to make the JSTOR database available to over 20 higher education institutions in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded JSTOR initially. Until January 2009, JSTOR operated as an independent, self-sustaining nonprofit organization with offices in New York City and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then JSTOR merged with the nonprofit Ithaka Harbors, Inc.—a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 and "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. Each object is uniquely identified by an integer value, starting at 1 which is used to create a stable URL.

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 -gram

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