Our History

JSTOR was conceived by William G. Bowen, then-President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to help university and college libraries challenged to provide adequate space for an ever-growing amount of published scholarship. Bowen's solution: convert printed scholarly journals into electronic form and store them in a centralized digital archive that can be shared, accessed, and relied upon by libraries and their users. Participating libraries and their institutions could free local 'bricks and mortar' space, reduce capital and other costs associated with collection storage, and vastly improve access to the scholarly papers and other content. There would also be other benefits: material would never be lost or checked-out, small institutions could have access to large collections, and ultimately, trust in digital preservation could help to bring about acceptance of electronic publication.

In 1995, following a pilot launched under the direction of the University of Michigan, JSTOR was established as an independent not-for-profit organization to make this idea a reality. In 2009, JSTOR merged with and became a service of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance scholarship and teaching in sustainable ways.