Why JSTOR

As a mission-driven not-for-profit, JSTOR partners with libraries, museums, and publishers to reduce costs, extend access, and preserve scholarship for the future.

We are also continuously working to expand the diversity of content on JSTOR, most recently by providing an openly accessible venue for libraries’ special collections to reach researchers, faculty, and students across the world. We do this because we believe in the power of knowledge to change the world for the better.

While we continue to add content and create new tools and functionality every year, we have never raised our fees — not just this year, or through the duration of the COVID-19 crisis, but over the past 23 years, since the day we launched.

This is a challenging time for all of us. As our community weathers the many challenges of the current environment, we will continue to evolve, all while ensuring reliable access during this time in which students and faculty depend on us more than ever. You can count on us.

Value

More than 1,300 journals in 75 disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences are included in the JSTOR Corporate Collection. Each year, hundreds of thousands of articles are added to the JSTOR archival journal collections as the moving wall for each journal advances, at no additional cost and while keeping our fees flat for the past 23 years. This means that in the Business and Economics disciplines alone, more than 90,000 articles have been added in the past five years.

If JSTOR had not kept our fees flat since 1997 and instead applied the industry’s typical 3% annual increase, annual fees would now be twice what they are today.

5 year growth – JSTOR Corporate Collection

92k Business & Economics articles added

Our ability to keep fees flat is possible because of the breadth of participation we have been able to build over the past two decades from libraries around the world. We are grateful for that continued support.

Unique benefits

In addition to ever-growing content at no added cost, we are committed to delivering high-quality, curated journal collections that provide full-run coverage and long-term preservation. This has helped to make JSTOR one of the most trusted and relied-upon research and teaching platforms.

A trusted, highly used source

JSTOR is a starting point for researchers and one of the most trusted, highly used platforms. According to the JSTOR 2018 Faculty Tracking Survey, nearly 60% of Humanities faculty surveyed view JSTOR as a primary starting point for their research. In 2019 alone, users conducted 262 million searches, and viewed and downloaded more than 220 million journal articles.

Full coverage

Journals include the full archival run, from volume 1, issue 1, up to the moving wall, including all previous and related titles (excepting very rare cases where issues cannot be located or we are unable to obtain rights to a portion of a title). As a result, many journals on JSTOR have greater coverage than on other providers.

Quality

JSTOR collections are curated and must meet specific criteria. Titles undergo a review process, including journal rankings, in-depth examination of research and citation data, and more.

Consistent access

Titles included in JSTOR archival journal collections will not be withdrawn, so you can be assured that journal content will always be available in JSTOR. In contrast, the titles available in other databases can change from year to year.

Preservation

Future accessibility to scholarship is essential, so JSTOR’s preservation approach includes both print and digital repositories of the entire archive of more than 3,000 journals. This allows libraries to remove print versions from their collections and repurpose shelf space while improving discovery and access. To date, more than 83 million pages of scholarship have been preserved in the archive.

Mission driven, not-for-profit

Thanks to your support, we continue to increase access to education and research around the world. This includes free or low-cost access where needed and collaborating with ITHAKA S+R to improve higher education in prisons. It also enables us to broaden our free and open content, create new tools, and help institutions make their collections openly available.