Our commitment as a nonprofit

As a trusted, nonprofit organization, JSTOR has made a commitment across our products and services to provide equitable, sustainable models to maximize access to knowledge. 

Being an independent nonprofit uniquely allows us to operate between libraries and publishers and users, balancing their needs and interests—with the ultimate goal of providing equitable access to knowledge today and in the future. 

Our priorities and approach

Provide affordable access for everyone


Support sustainable open access content

Our partnerships with libraries and publishers help us grow open access through content and community initiatives that make more content discoverable and freely accessible worldwide, including:

  • Reveal Digital, a collaboration with libraries to fund, source, digitize, and publish open access primary source collections from under-represented voices
  • Path to Open, which offers a sustainable open access solution for libraries, supports the nonprofit university press community, and invests in authors, by making books in the program open access three years after publication
  • JSTOR Daily, which makes scholarship more accessible through engaging articles and free teaching resources that enrich learning in the humanities, arts, and social sciences—each linking to open and freely available content on JSTOR

Lead the preservation of scholarship

  • We have secured the needed rights to ensure content on JSTOR is accessible to libraries for the long-term, providing a trusted alternative to hard copies on shelves
  • Our digital content can be readily converted to newer formats as they are developed in the future
  • Digital files for the entire archive are preserved using the approach and infrastructure developed by Portico
  • Our archives can be transferred to a third-party steward in the extremely unlikely event that JSTOR should ever cease operations

Advance scholarship and teaching practices

The latest from JSTOR

ix people stand and talk in front of a tall Gothic-style window with stained-glass details in a Mount Saint Mary’s University library. Bookshelves flank the window; Los Angeles is visible beyond it.
Blog

Building capacity together: Exploring collaborative strategies for digital collections stewardship

Digital collections stewardship depends on more than technology. Lee Dotson examines how SCELC, its member institutions, and JSTOR Stewardship are sharing expertise, support, and infrastructure to make distinctive collections more discoverable, accessible, and sustainable.

Black-and-white photograph of six women singing beside a piano while a seated conductor leads them, with a “Stern College for Women” banner hanging in the background.
News

Yeshiva University moves to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services for digital asset management, preservation, and access

Yeshiva University is migrating its digital collections from Islandora to JSTOR’s unified platform for digital asset management, preservation, and discovery.

Aerial black-and-white photograph of a large brick campus building with “MARTIN” painted across the roof, surrounded by lawns, trees, and intersecting walkways.
News

University of Tennessee at Martin moves to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, joins charter program

The University of Tennessee at Martin is adopting JSTOR Stewardship to strengthen preservation, discovery, and AI-assisted collections processing while joining a collaborative charter community. 27 words

Historical United States document certifying an American seaman’s citizenship, with handwritten entries, signatures, and illustrations of an eagle and sailing ship.
News

Coastal Carolina University joins JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services charter community

CCU joins JSTOR Stewardship’s charter program to build durable digital collections infrastructure, expand access, and explore AI-assisted processing with JSTOR Seeklight.

JSTOR logo
News

Boston Architectural College joins Tier 3 charter program of JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services

Boston Architectural College joins JSTOR Stewardship’s Tier 3 charter program, adding JSTOR Seeklight and helping shape responsible, AI-assisted approaches to stewardship.

Vintage comic-style advertisement titled “Second-Semester Alarm Clocks!” Three ringing alarm clocks appear beside a classroom of smiling students raising their hands. Text describes The Messengers as weekly study materials that help sustain students’ interest during the second semester.
Blog

Real research impact: What we’re learning about distinctive collections shared on JSTOR

New research reveals how distinctive collections shared on JSTOR are being discovered and used across research, teaching, and learning.

A red tile with the title: Digital Stewardship project administration
Event

JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services training: Project administration

Training for Stewardship participants (Tiers 2-3): create/edit projects, map publishing targets, manage users, access preservation, and create new projects from existing content. One of three sessions in a monthly Stewardship training series.

Twelfth-century manuscript drawing: Boethius, bearded and chained by the neck, sits in a walled prison holding an open book, hand to his cheek, while a tall crowned figure of Philosophy stands at left pointing toward him and two figures at right blow long horns.
Blog

“Go read the article, then we’ll talk”

From a Colorado prison, Janos Toevs used JSTOR to connect with scholar Shawn Bushway, turning years of independent research into an ongoing collaboration.

Black-and-white photograph of two students operating farm equipment in a cultivated field at Morrisville in 1926, with Hamilton Hall visible behind them.
News

SUNY Morrisville joins JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services charter program

SUNY Morrisville joins the JSTOR Stewardship charter program to expand access to distinctive collections, advance digitization, and explore AI-assisted collections processing with JSTOR Seeklight.