Providing a college-level research experience for students in jails and prisons.

Access for Departments of CorrectionsAccess for Libraries and Higher Education programs

What is JSTOR? What is the Access in Prison Initiative?

JSTOR is a premier research database of peer-reviewed scholarly material available in most colleges and universities in the United States, more than 3,000 secondary schools, and thousands of higher education institutions throughout the world.

We started the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative in 2007 to bring our library of high-quality educational content to students at correctional facilities to improve their educational experience and outcomes. With access to our ever-growing database of academic resources, students inside can develop critical research and information literacy skills that set them up for success.

How much does it cost?

We have waived all fees for the program for facilities in the United States and Australia as part of our mission to expand access to knowledge for underserved learning communities.

What’s included?

The JSTOR Access in Prison collection contains the same respected corpus of scholarly literature available to students on the outside, including 12 million academic journal articles, 100,000 books, and millions of images and primary source materials in 75 disciplines.

Recognizing that learners in carceral settings may lack current technological skills and research experience essential for success in a competitive future, we also include student and teacher guides, along with tutorials to help students develop the necessary skills to conduct rigorous and self-directed academic research.

Adaptable solutions for access inside

We offer three access options to meet the needs of higher education in prison programs and the security requirements of Departments of Corrections.

  • For direct access to JSTOR, we offer a full version that allows students to access all content once jstor.org is whitelisted.
  • With our mediated JSTOR option, available only inside correctional facilities, students gain online access to a version of JSTOR hosted at pep.jstor.org that has been designed to incorporate the media review policies of correctional facilities.
  • Offline access on a thumb drive (available by request) allows students to browse an index of the 500,000 most cited articles across disciplines. College or university libraries can then print and deliver the full text of articles that students request.