Our mission is to expand and enhance access to knowledge and education for people all over the world. As a nonprofit organization, our aim is for our policies and decisions to maximize impact, not revenue or profit. Our full journals and primary sources fee model option is part of our efforts to deliver on this mission by increasing access to content in a sustainable way for JSTOR, libraries, and content providers.

  • Why is JSTOR offering a full journals and primary sources model option now?

    Our mission is to expand and enhance access to knowledge and education for people all over the world. As a nonprofit organization, our aim is for our policies and decisions to maximize impact, not revenue or profit. Our full journals and primary sources fee model option is part of our efforts to deliver on this mission by increasing access to content in a sustainable way for JSTOR, libraries, and content providers.

    Since March 2020, more than 5,000 institutions have opted for full access to all archival journal and primary sources collections at no additional cost through our pandemic Expanded Access programs, and their students and faculty have downloaded or viewed this content more than 95 million times. We have also been able to continue to provide consistent revenue sharing to our publisher partners who have also been impacted by the pandemic and are essential to the work we do. Continuing that level of access is imperative to fulfilling our mission.

    As we consider what we are learning from our experience in a changing environment and ask how we can best contribute, we have identified three areas of focus: making more content universally accessible, preserving at-risk materials, and improving the utility of all this knowledge. To deliver on these aims, we are inviting community participation in a variety of initiatives in 2023.

    • Why did JSTOR choose this model to maximize access, rather than open access?

      We evaluated many models, including Subscribe to Open, and determined they were not viable for a variety of reasons at this time. To develop this model we consulted our participants to validate whether the full journals and primary sources fee model is the right approach. Our fee model aligns with their feedback and our mission by:

      • Eliminating the Archive Capital Fee (ACF) on new purchases effective April 1, 2023. Part of JSTOR’s non-profit mission is to support the long-term preservation of the content in our care. We established the ACF to provide resources so that JSTOR could fulfill that promise. We have retained and invested these funds for long-term growth, drawing on them only when needed for specific preservation activities like migrating content formats to keep apace with technology. Because of the significant support from the education community over the past 25+ years, and our careful investment of those resources, we have secured sufficient reserves to continue to preserve this content in the future.
      • Making the model optional: Libraries may choose whether to opt in for immediate comprehensive access or continue with their existing collection-by-collection licenses.
      • Providing a “slow and steady” approach: Institutions choosing the full journals and primary sources model will continue to have access to all of the journals and primary source content that they have with expanded access, but their annual fees will increase only modestly to cover JSTOR’s costs and to ensure that, over the long run, all institutions are contributing similarly to JSTOR’s long-term sustainability.
      • Delivering greater impact. The full journals and primary sources model maximizes the amount of access and impact generated by JSTOR at current levels of revenue.