Mission

As part of the nonprofit ITHAKA, JSTOR’s mission is to improve access to knowledge and education for people around the world. We partner with libraries, museums, and publishers to reduce costs, extend access, and preserve scholarship for the future. We do this because we believe in the power of knowledge to change the world for the better.

Our mission manifests in everything we do. Here are just a few examples:

Sustainable open access content

Our partnerships with libraries and publishers help us make a growing range of content discoverable and freely accessible worldwide.

  • This includes open access journals, ebooks, images and other media, and research reports.
  • Institutional partners also contribute to a growing corpus of freely available digital special collections on JSTOR known as shared collections.
  • Reveal Digital collaborates with libraries to fund, source, digitize, and publish open access primary source collections from under-represented voices.
  • Path to Open offers sustainable open access solutions for libraries, supports the nonprofit university press community, and invests in authors, increasing access to diverse ideas and research by making books in the program open access three years after publication.
  • JSTOR Daily is an online publication that contextualizes current events with scholarship, with every story linking to publicly available research on JSTOR.

Preservation to safeguard scholarship

We understand that future accessibility to scholarship is essential. JSTOR pursues long-term preservation in several ways:

  • We work with experts to preserve the original print publications underlying the archives to keep them available for re-digitization and other unanticipated needs.
  • JSTOR creates digital content that can be readily converted to newer formats as they are developed in the future. To protect against loss, we have established redundant data centers each housing a complete copy of the JSTOR Digital Library. Digital files for the entire archive are also preserved using the approach and infrastructure developed by Portico.
  • In the extremely unlikely event that JSTOR should ever cease operations, funds may be transferred to a third-party steward to ensure the archives will continue to be preserved.

Advancing research and teaching practices

JSTOR is committed to advancing scholarship through innovative digital tools and resources that enhance both research and teaching, including:

Artstor on JSTOR

The Artstor collection includes millions of high-quality images and other media for education and research across various disciplines, contributed by institutions worldwide. Originally available on a standalone platform, Artstor was integrated into JSTOR in 2024, allowing users to discover these resources alongside journals, books, and primary sources from global libraries. This integration creates a diverse learning environment, fostering new opportunities for insight and discovery.

Free or low-cost access for low-income countries

Through the JSTOR Access Initiative, we provide free or very low-cost access to more than 1,500 institutions in many nations. This is made possible through a combination of philanthropic support and the fees paid by libraries in other countries around the world, as well as publishers’ eagerness to support this work.

History

JSTOR was conceived in 1994 by William G. Bowen, then-president of the Mellon Foundation, to help university and college libraries provide adequate space for an ever-increasing amount of published scholarship. Bowen’s solution: convert printed scholarly journals into electronic form and store them in a centralized digital archive. Participating libraries and their institutions could free physical space, reduce capital and other costs associated with collection storage, and vastly improve access to scholarly research.

In 1995, following a pilot launched under the direction of the University of Michigan, JSTOR was established as an independent nonprofit organization with a mission to advance and preserve knowledge through the use of digital technologies. In 2009, JSTOR merged with and became a service of the nonprofit ITHAKA, joining together with Portico and Ithaka S+R as services focused on expanding access to knowledge and education worldwide.

Since that time, ITHAKA has acquired two additional high-quality, impactful services that further advance access to knowledge and reduce costs for libraries and that are now integrated with JSTOR: Reveal Digital, a service that uses a unique library crowd-funded model to support the development of open access digital collections, and Artstor, an initiative aimed at supporting the digitization and use of images for teaching and research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

A dynamic illustration of galloping horses in vivid brown and orange tones, drawn over a ledger sheet, symbolizing Native American culture and history.
A collection of minimalist vessels, bowls, and pitchers in muted tones arranged against a deep orange backdrop.
A vibrant bouquet of wildflowers, including reds, yellows, and blues, set in a white vase against a soft pastel background.
A whimsical painting of a cat’s face with large green eyes, featuring a bird perched on its forehead in warm, abstract colors.
A stylized Japanese figure in a red kimono, adorned with geometric black and white patterns, gracefully poised against a dark background.
A bold red, heart-shaped chair with sweeping, curved wings and a metallic cross-shaped base.

1. Donald F. Montileaux. Singing of the Horses. 2006. Davis Museum, Wellesley College. 2. William Bailey. Mercatale Still Life. 1981. The Museum of Modern Art. 3. Odilon Redon. Vase of Flowers (Pink Background). ca. 1906. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 4. Paul Klee. Cat and Bird. 1928. The Museum of Modern Art. 5. Kaori Kawano. Dancing Figure (Kamuro). n.d. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 6. Verner Panton (designer) and Plus-linje (manufacturer). Heart Cone Chair. 1959. RISD Museum.