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Platform

JSTOR Workspace

Our free, secure research environment that helps you gather, organize, annotate, and share the materials that power inquiry.

Whether you’re building a literature review, preparing a lecture, designing an assignment, or guiding students through their first research project, Workspace keeps everything you need in one place.

Design your Workspace
Pointillist painting of a circus sideshow with a performer on a platform, musicians in the background, and a crowd gathered in the foreground under rows of glowing lights.

Why Workspace?

You can streamline your entire research workflow, allowing you to:

Save everything you need

Collect journal articles, primary sources, book chapters, and images directly from JSTOR—or upload your own materials to integrate course readings, slides, or scans.

Organize research your way

Create folders and subfolders for courses, topics, projects, or units. Rearrange items with drag-and-drop custom ordering, add descriptive notes, and quickly search within your Workspace to find exactly what you need.

A soft-edged abstract painting with three horizontal color fields—purple, white, and red—set against a muted background.
Small ceramic vase with a rounded body and narrow neck, glazed in gradients of deep purple, magenta, and blue against a gray background.

Support teaching, learning, and collaboration

Share curated folders with colleagues or students at your institution. Workspace preserves your chosen sort order and layout, making it a powerful tool for model bibliographies, lecture preparation, visual analysis activities, and research scaffolding.

Present and export with ease

Turn your saved materials into PDF reading packets, PowerPoint decks, or ZIP files in seconds—ideal for LMS uploads, class presentations, or assignment handouts. Zoomed-in views of images automatically export as separate slides for close-looking exercises.

Key features

Save and annotate content

  • Save items from search results or item pages
  • Capture and save zoomed-in “image details”
  • Add private notes to any saved item for research or instruction

Upload your own files

  • Upload up to 10 images at a time (JPEG or PNG)
  • Add metadata to make your files searchable within Workspace
  • Use uploaded items just like JSTOR content: present, export, compare, and share

Share and collaborate

  • Share Workspace folders with anyone logged into JSTOR through your institution
  • Allow others to copy your folder into their own Workspace for reuse or adaptation
  • Ideal for instruction, cross-department collaboration, or guided student research

Export in multiple formats

  • PDF reference lists with thumbnails and metadata
  • PowerPoint decks with automatic item metadata
  • ZIP files for offline access to high-resolution images
  • Citation exports to RefWorks, EasyBib, NoodleTools, RIS, or plain text

Present directly from Workspace

  • Use full-screen present mode to zoom, pan, toggle metadata, and move between items
  • Great for classroom discussion, visual analysis, and research presentations
A bold abstract painting with simplified geometric shapes in purple, black, red, and blue, forming a stylized figure-like form.

Use Workspace for…

Classroom instruction
  • Build curated sets of readings or images
  • Compare primary sources side-by-side
  • Share research folders with students for structured inquiry
  • Export slides for in-class analysis activities
A gold Egyptian Revival brooch featuring a kneeling figure beside a harp-like frame holding a purple carved gemstone, with colorful enamel details.
Librarians and instructional designers
  • Create skill-building research guides and teaching kits
  • Demonstrate keyword strategies, Boolean logic, and source evaluation
  • Support consultations with reusable example folders
  • Present digital collections effectively in instruction sessions
A full-length portrait of a young girl in a ruffled white dress standing confidently against a bright pink, patterned background.
Students
  • Keep all research for a course or project in one place
  • Annotate items with notes and reminders
  • Build early bibliographies and export citations
  • Store PDFs, images, and JSTOR items together for final papers
A highly magnified microscopy image of a dermatofibroma, showing swirling pink and purple cellular structures in dense layers.
Researchers
  • Organize long-term projects across devices
  • Save detailed views of images for analysis
  • Export research packets for collaborators
  • Present findings from Workspace during talks or conferences
A Japanese woodblock print of a woman in a patterned purple and red kimono, shown in profile with a delicate, contemplative expression.

Getting started

  1. Create a free personal JSTOR account (required for Workspace)
  2. Log into JSTOR and select Workspace from the top navigation
  3. Start saving content, creating folders, and building your research environment

Build your research ecosystem

Workspace turns JSTOR into a powerful end-to-end research platform—designed for discovery, organization, analysis, and teaching. Whether you’re preparing a class, writing a paper, or helping someone grow as a researcher, Workspace gives you the structure, flexibility, and portability you need.

Design your Workspace

I have multiple different Workspace folders for separate projects. Often, JSTOR is my first stop in a research project and I simply collect as many tangentially related articles as I can find.

Richard Conlon, Undergraduate Student

Norwich University

I research a wide variety of topics simultaneously so [Workspace] helps me keep my research organized and easily accessible.

Graduate Student

Georgia Southern University

Workspace keeps all of my research together!

Rachel Patterson, Graduate Student


I save hundreds of articles [to Workspace] to reference at later dates.

Graduate Student


View image credits from this page
Pointillist painting of a circus sideshow with a performer on a platform, musicians in the background, and a crowd gathered in the foreground under rows of glowing lights.

Georges Seurat. Circus Sideshow (Parade de Cirque). 1887–88. Part of Open: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artstor.

A soft-edged abstract painting with three horizontal color fields—purple, white, and red—set against a muted background.

Mark Rothko. Untitled (Purple, White, and Red). 1953. Part of Art Institute of Chicago, Artstor.

Small ceramic vase with a rounded body and narrow neck, glazed in gradients of deep purple, magenta, and blue against a gray background.

Hermann August Seger and Royal Porcelain Manufactory. Vase. 1900. Part of Open: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Artstor.

A bold abstract painting with simplified geometric shapes in purple, black, red, and blue, forming a stylized figure-like form.

Max Ackermann. Violet Center. 1968. Part of The Renaissance Society (University of Chicago), Artstor.

A gold Egyptian Revival brooch featuring a kneeling figure beside a harp-like frame holding a purple carved gemstone, with colorful enamel details.

Theodore B. Starr. Brooch. ca. 1900. Part of Open: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artstor.

A full-length portrait of a young girl in a ruffled white dress standing confidently against a bright pink, patterned background.

Gustav Klimt. Mäda Primavesi. 1912-13. Part of Open: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artstor.

A highly magnified microscopy image of a dermatofibroma, showing swirling pink and purple cellular structures in dense layers.

Kevin Mackenzie, University of Aberdeen. Dermatofibroma, LM. n.d. Part of Open: Wellcome Collection, Artstor.

A Japanese woodblock print of a woman in a patterned purple and red kimono, shown in profile with a delicate, contemplative expression.

Hashiguchi Goyo. Woman in Purple Kimono. 20-Oct. Part of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Artstor.