JSTOR

• 1. Introduction

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  JSTOR began not as a vision for the future of scholarship, but as a solution to a very practical crisis in libraries. By the early 1990s, research and university libraries were drowning. The number of academic journals had multiplied far beyond what any institution could afford to house, in both cost and physical space. The question was not which journals to keep. The question was whether the entire system of preserving scholarship was about to collapse under its own weight.

  William G. Bowen, who had served as president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988, looked at that problem and saw a digital path forward. He founded JSTOR in 1994, naming it short for Journal Storage. What started as a modest attempt to digitize back issues of ten economics and history journals grew into a database containing more than 12 million articles across more than 75 disciplines.

  But scale alone does not explain why JSTOR became one of the most contested and consequential institutions in modern academic life. That story involves an Ivy League campus network, a deal with one of the oldest scientific societies in the world, and a legal case that ended in tragedy and sparked a worldwide debate about who owns knowledge.

• 2. Bowen's Solution

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  Ira Fuchs, Princeton University's vice president for Computing and Information Technology, played a pivotal role in shaping what JSTOR would become. Bowen had initially considered distributing the digitized journals on CD-ROMs. Fuchs argued against it. CD-ROM, he said, was becoming obsolete, and network distribution could eliminate redundancy while reaching far more users.

  Fuchs had concrete evidence at hand. All of Princeton's administrative and academic buildings were networked by 1989. The student dormitory network was completed in 1994. And campus networks like Princeton's were already linked to larger systems, including BITNET and the Internet.

  JSTOR was initiated in 1995, launching at seven different library sites. Beyond simple digitization, the team put special software in place to ensure that pictures and graphs reproduced clearly and remained readable. Access improved steadily based on feedback from those first sites, and the platform became a fully searchable index reachable through any ordinary web browser.

  The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided JSTOR's initial funding. Until January 2009, JSTOR operated as an independent, self-sustaining nonprofit, with offices in New York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan. That year it merged with Ithaka Harbors, Inc., a nonprofit founded in 2003 and dedicated, in its own words, to helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies.

• 3. Reaching Back to 1665

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  Bowen, Fuchs, and Kevin Guthrie, who served as JSTOR's president, knew the initial ten-journal pilot was only a beginning. They turned their ambitions toward one of the most significant archives in the history of science: the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the world.

  They met with representatives of the Royal Society of London and reached an agreement to digitize the Philosophical Transactions all the way back to its very first issue in 1665. The work of adding those volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000.

  The following year, in 1999, JSTOR formed a partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee and created a mirror website at the University of Manchester. The goal was to extend JSTOR's reach to more than 20 higher education institutions across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

  Today JSTOR's content comes from more than 900 publishers. Each object in the database carries a unique integer identifier starting at 1, which is used to generate a stable URL. That architecture reflects a founding commitment: the idea that once something was digitized and indexed, it should remain findable indefinitely.

• 4. What JSTOR Contains

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  JSTOR Plant Science sits alongside the main site as a specialized gateway for researchers, teachers, and students in botany, biology, ecology, and conservation studies. It provides access to plant type specimens, taxonomic structures, and scientific literature. The materials come through the Global Plants Initiative, and access is limited to JSTOR and GPI members. Two partner networks contribute to the collection: the African Plants Initiative, focused on plants from Africa, and the Latin American Plants Initiative, covering plants from Latin America.

  In November 2012, JSTOR launched Books at JSTOR, adding 15,000 current and backlist books to the platform and linking them to journal article citations and reviews. Two years later, in September 2014, JSTOR Daily launched as an online magazine designed to connect academic research to a broader public. Articles in JSTOR Daily are generally drawn from entries in the archive, often providing the backstory behind current events.

  Reveal Digital represents one of the more unusual corners of the platform. It is a JSTOR-hosted collection of documents produced by or about underground, marginalized, and dissenting communities of the twentieth century. The materials include zines, prison newspapers, AIDS art, student-movement documents, black civil rights materials, and a white supremacy archive.

  The JSTOR Labs group also operates a separate open service called Data for Research, which allows corpus analysis of the archive. Researchers can build focused sets of articles and request datasets containing word frequencies and basic metadata in XML or CSV formats.

• 5. The Aaron Swartz Case

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  In late 2010 and into early 2011, Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer, writer, political organizer, and Internet activist, used MIT's data network to bulk-download a substantial portion of JSTOR's collection of academic journal articles. When the download was discovered, investigators placed a video camera in the room and left the relevant computer untouched. Once footage confirmed his identity, the download was stopped.

  Rather than pursue a civil lawsuit, JSTOR reached a settlement with Swartz in June 2011. He surrendered the downloaded data and the matter, from JSTOR's perspective, was closed. Federal authorities did not see it that way. The following month, prosecutors charged Swartz with crimes including wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. Prosecutors claimed he intended to make the papers available on peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.

  Swartz pleaded not guilty to all counts and was released on $100,000 bail. In September 2012, U.S. attorneys expanded the charges from four to thirteen, with a possible penalty of 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. The case was still pending when Swartz died by suicide in January 2013.

  The case reshaped public debate around access to publicly funded research. It also appears to have influenced JSTOR's own trajectory. JSTOR cited the Swartz controversy and a protest torrent of public domain content released by Greg Maxwell as reasons it pressed ahead with its Early Journal Content initiative, which made over 500,000 documents available free of charge beginning on the 6th of September, 2011.

• 6. The Access Question

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  Every year, JSTOR blocks 150 million attempts by non-subscribers to read articles. That figure sits at the center of an ongoing argument about who scholarship is for. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has described being told that when JSTOR was asked how much it would cost to make the entire archive available to the world, the organization reportedly responded with a figure of $250 million.

  The "moving wall" governs much of JSTOR's content. Under this system, there is an agreed delay between a journal's current issue and its latest version available on JSTOR, typically three to five years. Publishers and JSTOR negotiate the length of that wall, and publishers may request changes. Formerly, publishers could also request a "fixed wall," a specified date after which no new volumes would be added; agreements of this kind were still in effect with three publishers covering 29 journals.

  In January 2012, JSTOR launched a pilot called Register and Read, offering limited free access to archived articles for individuals who created an account. By January 2013, the program had expanded from an initial 76 publishers to about 1,200 journals from over 700 publishers. Registered readers can access up to six articles per calendar month online, but cannot print or download PDFs.

  In 2022, JSTOR Access in Prison launched to extend the platform to incarcerated people. By 2024, more than one million people inside jails and prisons had access to JSTOR, either online or offline. As of 2014, JSTOR had also begun a pilot with Wikipedia, giving established editors reading privileges through the Wikipedia Library, mirroring the access available through a university library.