In my years at JSTOR, one thing has remained constant in our work with libraries and academic publishers: when scholarly books are easy to discover and easy to use, people read them. When access is fragmented, restricted, or uncertain, even the most important scholarship can struggle to reach a global audience. This shared understanding among the community of libraries, publishers, and scholars led to the development of a new Books at JSTOR model called Publisher Collections.
A group of librarians and publishers came together over several months to develop a new business model that we felt offered a better, more comprehensive solution for supporting scholarly ebook publishing than what exists today. Anticipating new challenges facing libraries, publishers, and authors–including budget and staffing constraints, disparate acquisition models, and declining sales–we all felt a need to develop a model to better serve the academic community within a system that has become increasingly difficult to navigate.
This work has been collaborative from the start, shaped by a shared belief that we can and must do better.
What we’ve seen on JSTOR—and why it matters
Since Books at JSTOR launched in 2012, we have established a clear view into how scholars actually use content at a global scale. Across thousands of institutions worldwide, ebooks are no longer peripheral to research and teaching, they have become central.
When ebooks are available on JSTOR, alongside journals, research reports, and images, they are embedded directly into discovery and learning workflows. Usage data consistently reinforces a simple point: the challenge is not demand for scholarly ebooks, but the conditions under which they are made available.
Open access usage makes this especially clear. JSTOR now hosts more than 15,000 open access ebooks from over 165 publishers that have had over 65 million uses worldwide. In 2025 alone, those titles were used over 12 million times by researchers at more than 16,000 institutions across 190 countries. As discussed in other blog posts, when licensed titles were converted to open access, usage increased. This drove the development of programs like Path to Open, where usage rose more than 5,500% on average within the first year.
These usage numbers represent students finding sources they otherwise wouldn’t have, faculty assigning books with confidence that students can access them, and authors seeing their work reach readers far beyond the institutions that could have purchased it.
At the same time, libraries and publishers have been clear about the strain in today’s ebook marketplace. Library budgets are flat or declining, staff capacity is stretched, and ebooks can reside across multiple restricted models on multiple platforms. University presses are navigating declining sales of current-year titles while absorbing the real costs of open access publishing.
Publisher Collections was developed in response to these shared pressures across the community to meet an immediate need.
Why we built Publisher Collections
Publisher Collections is a new acquisition model within the Books at JSTOR program, developed collaboratively with academic libraries and publishers to address the above challenges directly.
The model allows libraries to acquire a publisher’s complete current publication-year output as a collection, with a perpetual JSTOR license to that year’s titles. Participating libraries also receive seamless access to the publisher’s previously published titles on JSTOR for as long as they remain active participants.
Several principles guided our work:
- Perpetual access matters. Libraries told us clearly that long-term stewardship remains essential. Institutions retain perpetual access to every year’s collection they acquire, regardless of future participation.
- Backlist access should deepen value, not replace ownership. Access to earlier titles during participation enhances discovery and provides the full run of a publisher’s titles on a single platform, improving the user experience and not requiring a library to acquire a title twice, to have access on another platform.
- Publishers must lead the model. Each press defines its own collection and pricing in collaboration with JSTOR. This is not a top-down or aggregator-controlled approach.
- Licensed and open access content should work together seamlessly. Publisher Collections include licensed titles, immediate open access titles, and delayed open access titles through Path to Open.
- Pricing must be equitable and predictable. Fees are tiered by JSTOR classification and include country-level pricing to support institutions of all sizes worldwide.
All titles are DRM-free, offer unlimited-user access, and are fully integrated into JSTOR’s platform, ensuring consistent discovery, accessibility, and long-term preservation through Portico.
Built with the community
Publisher Collections emerged from a working group that included librarians and publishers, surveys and interviews with more than 175 librarians, and consultative conversations with over 60 academic presses.
Early participants included Liverpool University Press, University of North Carolina Press, University of Wisconsin Press, and Berghahn Books, with more presses such as University of Illinois Press, SUNY Press, New York University Press, Cornell University Press, Fordham University Press, and Duke University Press joining as the model evolved. View a full list and descriptions of participating publishers for 2026.
What stood out in the conversations with the working group was not just alignment on mechanics, but on values and mission as not-for-profit organizations.
Publishers emphasized the importance of working with a nonprofit partner they trust. Librarians spoke candidly about the pressure to justify acquisitions and the value of a model built around predictability, perpetual access, and reduced administrative burden.
We’re very pleased to have the new option of the Publisher Collections model as part of our acquisitions strategy: it offers content from presses whom we know to be popular with our readers, and the DRM-free access to both backlist and frontlist titles will be a valuable addition to the ebook offering we provide for our users.
As Rebecca Gower at the University of Cambridge noted, “DRM-free access to both backlist and frontlist titles from trusted presses is a meaningful addition for users.” Librarians like Lynn Klundt at Northern State University also reminded us that JSTOR’s nonprofit role still matters deeply in an increasingly commercial landscape.
Those perspectives shaped this work at every step.
Open access as a shared responsibility
JSTOR has worked with the community on supporting open access books since 2016, making open access a central pillar to Publisher Collections.
Every participating publisher offers open access titles on JSTOR, and collectively these presses have made more than 2,000 titles openly available on the platform. Publisher Collections supports this commitment by helping generate sustainable revenue that can be reinvested in OA publishing, by hosting and preserving OA titles at no cost, and by integrating OA content fully into discovery and usage workflows.
Importantly, this support comes without additional surcharges. The goal is to ensure that licensed acquisitions and open publishing reinforce one another over time.
Why this matters now
For libraries, Publisher Collections offers a way to simplify acquisitions, reduce title redundancy across platforms, and provide comprehensive access to trusted publisher content, while preserving long-term value through perpetual ownership.
We were thrilled to learn about JSTOR’s new Publisher Collections program. We value university press publications and, like most libraries, we are running out of space for physical collections. JSTOR’s new program provides value both in the cost and ease of acquiring UP content, and in meeting our goals to use our limited space more efficiently.
“We were thrilled to learn about JSTOR’s new Publisher Collections program. We value university press publications and, like most libraries, we are running out of space for physical collections. JSTOR’s new program provides value both in the cost and ease of acquiring UP content, and in meeting our goals to use our limited space more efficiently.”- Megan Gaffney, head, collections, acquisitions, and resource sharing department, University of Delaware Library
For publishers, it creates a predictable, mission-aligned channel that increases visibility and usage, supports open access goals, and avoids the constraints of exclusivity.
For authors and readers, it means broader global reach, easier discovery, and more consistent access to high-quality scholarship on a platform they already use.
Publisher Collections does not replace other acquisition models within Books at JSTOR. It complements them, offering another path, particularly well suited to institutions seeking breadth, stability, and alignment with community academic values.
Looking ahead
Announced in 2025, Publisher Collections are now live on JSTOR with more than 20 participating academic publishers, with plans to grow significantly in the years ahead. Like JSTOR’s earlier efforts to support the transition from print to digital journals, this model is designed for the long term.
We built Publisher Collections because libraries and publishers asked for a nonprofit, community-driven alternative that was grounded in evidence, shaped by collaboration, and focused on expanding access sustainably.I invite you to explore the collections, engage with participating publishers, and help shape what comes next.
