Maximize the impact of your ebook collection with flexible acquisition models
Books are essential for exploring the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. Yet many libraries face growing challenges with maintaining their collections, including limited physical space, tight budgets, and increasing demands around digital discovery, access, and preservation. This is why they need a future-focused partner, one that collaborates closely with librarians, publishers, and scholars to develop affordable and sustainable ebook solutions.
That’s where Books at JSTOR comes in. An offering from JSTOR—a mission-driven nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to knowledge—Books at JSTOR offers flexible ebook acquisition models, including individual title acquisitions, subject packages, and evidence-based options paired with 13,000+ open access titles. We also collaborate with workflow partners, like GOBI Library Solutions, Rialto/OASIS, and Schweitzer Fachinformationen, to make ebook acquisitions easier and more efficient for libraries.
Through close collaboration with the academic community, we offer DRM-free, perpetual access to 158,000+ ebooks from 340+ academic publishers alongside journal articles, primary sources, images, and multimedia on JSTOR’s integrated platform.
Open Access
As a pioneer and one of the largest providers of OA ebooks, JSTOR supports libraries and publishers in expanding equitable access to high-quality scholarly ebooks. With 13,000+ rapidly growing titles from 145+ publishers, these models remove barriers to access and discovery while ensuring academic rigor, long-term preservation, and global reach. Through new initiatives like Path to Open, JSTOR offers sustainable, collaborative approaches that help publishers fund new titles, and libraries invest in a more inclusive, accessible future for scholarly publishing.
Library-friendly acquisition models
Books at JSTOR allows you to customize your acquisition strategy by offering flexible options to suit your institution’s collection strategy and budget. We can provide holdings comparisons and recommendations based on your institution’s usage data for journals and OA ebooks.
Path to Open
Path to Open is a groundbreaking initiative that supports the transition of high-quality scholarly monographs to open access at scale. It offers 300 new copyright year, peer-reviewed monographs annually, with the goal to reach 1000+ titles in disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences by 2026. Designed to increase access to diverse ideas, support small and medium university presses, invest in authors, and help libraries acquire affordable, high-quality frontlist titles, Path to Open enables sustainable open access publishing, and connects readers to authors from around the world.
Subject packages and individual titles
Subject packages and individual titles is a Books at JSTOR model that gives libraries the flexibility to build ebook packages with perpetual access on JSTOR, tailored to their budget and curriculum. Designed with librarians in mind, pre-built subject packages feature frontlist and backlist ebooks from 2014 through 2024, covering more than 60 disciplines. This provides an easy starting point for tailored packages, to help streamline acquisition workflows and free up staff time for other priorities. Libraries can also choose title-by-title selection to build packages by selecting from our full list of 150,000+ titles from 340+ academic publishers, or by using any combination of publisher, discipline, and copyright year.
Demand-Driven Acquisition
Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) is a Books at JSTOR model that provides libraries with perpetual, cost-effective access to a broad range of high-quality ebooks with no upfront deposit, and offers publishers increased discovery of their titles. Libraries only pay for titles once they meet a usage threshold, ensuring every acquisition reflects real reader demand, making it a highly efficient and low-risk way to build collections. With DRM-free, perpetual access on JSTOR and seamless workflow through GOBI Library Solutions or Rialto/OASIS, DDA supports efficient, user-driven collection development.
Evidence-Based Acquisition
Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) is a Books at JSTOR model that gives libraries unlimited access to 84,500+ high-quality backlist ebooks from 115+ scholarly publishers for a single upfront fee. After one year of unlimited DRM-free access, libraries use usage data to select the titles they want to own, ensuring every acquisition with perpetual access on JSTOR reflects real reader engagement. EBA is a flexible, cost-effective way to expand access, simplify workflows, and make informed collection development decisions.
As many of our library participants want to offer a broad range of frontlist and backlist content while controlling costs, one option to consider is combining EBA with DDA. DDA can easily be combined with EBA if you manage DDA through GOBI Library Solutions or Rialto/OASIS. We ensure that all titles in EBA are excluded from your DDA profile so they aren’t automatically triggered if the usage threshold is reached.