As a nonprofit service of ITHAKA, JSTOR is committed to expanding access to knowledge and education worldwide. This includes providing country-based savings, or free or low-cost access to JSTOR through the JSTOR Access Initiative to help ensure institutions in different economic contexts can participate.
Expanding access through equitable fee models
More than 20 years ago, as JSTOR’s archival journal collections were expanding around the world, we introduced a country-based savings model. At the time, despite tiered fees by institution size, we knew that a single, global fee could not match the economic realities of institutions in very different contexts. In those early days, we also considered barriers like language (e.g. the majority of JSTOR content being in English) and access to network infrastructure (overseas bandwidth was limited, so institutions in some countries had a severely denigrated level of service and access).
Our approach to accomplishing that goal was straightforward: if JSTOR was going to be a durable, shared resource for the global scholarly community, we had to standardize fees in a way that recognized meaningful socioeconomic differences between countries. Country-based savings became the mechanism for doing that—helping institutions outside the US, especially in lower-income settings, participate at more affordable rates, while still contributing to the long‑term sustainability of the archive. Around the same time, we also launched what is now known as the JSTOR Access Initiative (JAI). JAI provides free or very low‑cost access to the JSTOR Archival Journals and Primary Sources collection, and the Books at JSTOR Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) model.
Taken together, country savings and JAI have enabled thousands of institutions to participate in JSTOR who would not otherwise have been able to.
Using an independent framework to guide access
Beginning in 2027, country-based savings and JAI eligibility and tier levels will be determined using the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), a globally recognized measure of countries’ social and economic progress published by the United Nations Development Programme. JSTOR assesses all countries based on HDI every five years to help ensure JSTOR Access Initiative eligibility continues to reflect current global conditions.
We use HDI because it broadly considers factors of human development and provides a transparent, independently maintained framework that aligns with JSTOR’s mission of expanding access to knowledge and education. HDI assigns a score to each country blending four elements: life expectancy, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling, and GNI per capita. It is updated annually, widely used across sectors, and has two qualities that matter a great deal to us:
- It is a credible, third‑party standard: We are not relying on costly consultation or our own ad hoc judgments to decide which countries receive which level of support.
- It focuses on human development, not just economic output:This aligns closely with ITHAKA’s mission and JSTOR’s role in expanding access to knowledge and education.
Continuing our commitment to global access
Country-based savings and the JAI reflect our longstanding commitment to making scholarly resources more accessible around the world. By using a transparent, independently maintained framework like HDI, JSTOR seeks to balance affordability, equity, and sustainability in a consistent way. This approach helps ensure that our fee structures evolve alongside the changing global landscape, while enabling institutions in a wide range of economic contexts to participate in and benefit from the shared scholarly record.
Learn more about how country-based savings and JSTOR Access Initiative (JAI) eligibility are determined using the Human Development Index (HDI), and see how your country is classified.
