News

Knowledge Unlatched and JSTOR to study usage of Open Access books

Berlin/New York, Feb 6, 2017. Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the Open Access initiative supporting monographs in the humanities and social sciences, and JSTOR, the digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources, are partnering to study usage patterns in Open Access by cross-promoting KU titles. While KU will continue to host its titles on the OAPEN platform, it will expand the hosting of 30 Open Access titles to JSTOR. This set includes titles in History, Literature, Political Science, Anthropology, and Media & Communications—all published by leading scholarly presses and “unlatched” with the support of libraries around the world. Read more»

JSTOR Library Digest – Winter 2017

JSTOR by the numbers: more content for libraries in 2016 Our "moving wall" advances in 2017, adding another year of archival journal content to the JSTOR platform. In 2016 alone, we added 91 journals and 435,000+ articles, representing 3.2 million pages and 797 linear feet of shelf space savings. Our ebooks program, Books at JSTOR, expanded with the addition of 10,000+ ebooks and 41 new publishers. To date, the ever-growing JSTOR digital library contains more than 45,000 ebooks, 2,400+ journals, and 10.9 million articles (representing 70 million pages and 17,000 linear feet of shelf space savings). Read more»

Can we build a better ebook?

In late 2016, the JSTOR Labs team collaborated with librarians, scholars, and publishers to explore the challenge of improving discovery and user experience of digital monographs. Informed by these ideas, the team created Topicgraph, a prototype visualization tool for a set of open access monographs.

Additionally, a draft of the white paper from the collaboration “Reimagining the Digital Monograph: Design Thinking to Build New Tools for Researchers” is open for comment until January 31, 2017. We invite you… Read more»

New topic pages, faceted search results, and easier off-campus access

We’ve recently released several features on the platform:… Read more»

More content for libraries in 2017

Our “moving wall” advances in 2017, adding another year of archival journal content to the JSTOR platform.

In 2016 alone, we added 91 journals and 435,000+ articles, representing 3.2 million pages and 797 linear feet of shelf space savings. Our ebooks program, Books at JSTOR, expanded with the addition of 10,000+ ebooks and 41 new publishers.

To date, the ever-growing JSTOR digital library contains more than 45,000 ebooks, 2,400+ journals, and 10.9 million articles (representing 70 million pages… Read more»

Data Release: 2016-2017 Titles (October – January)

January 2017 release content New titles Film Criticism (Arts & Sciences XV) Coverage: Vol. 30, No. 1 (Fall, 2005) – Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring, 2015) Moving Wall: zero Publisher: Allegheny College ISSN: 0163-5069 Read more»

Want to improve Wikipedia? We have your LibGuide

From January 15 to February 3, Wikipedia is encouraging librarians to add reliable references to articles with its #1Lib1Ref campaign. JSTOR is here to help! We’ve created a new 1Lib1Ref LibGuide with easy instructions on how to Find, Evaluate, and Link to citations.

JSTOR is involved in making Wikipedia a more reliable resource for researchers and the public at large. Since 2012, we have provided Wikipedia editors with free access to the JSTOR archival collections. And as mentioned… Read more»

Global Plants end-of-year review

It’s been another wonderful year for Global Plants thanks to the hard work and dedication of our partner herbaria around the world! We wrapped up 2016 with 2,878,998 total objects, which includes 231,549 visuals and archive materials. We received content for the first time from over 20 partners!

The Netherlands
Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, formerly Amsterdam University (AMD)

Ukraine
V. N. Karazin National University Herbarium (CWU)
Donetsk Botanical Garden of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine… Read more»

Open Access eBooks now available on JSTOR

We are now making Open Access monographs available on the JSTOR platform. An initial set of 63 titles is available from four outstanding publishers: University of California Press, University of Michigan Press, UCL Press, and Cornell University Press. We expect to add several hundred more Open Access titles over the next year.

The ebooks, which reflect JSTOR’s high standards for quality content, are freely available for anyone in the world to use. Each ebook carries one of six Creative… Read more»

ITHAKA founder and trustee William G. Bowen dies

The world has lost a uniquely gifted leader and friend. Bill Bowen passed away peacefully at 83 on October 20, 2016. He dedicated his entire professional life to the world of education and was founding chairman of JSTOR and ITHAKA and founding trustee of Artstor. We extend our heartfelt sympathies and deepest condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.

Learn more about Bill Bowen’s extraordinary life.… Read more»

Global Plants at the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections

We were delighted to see so many partners and presentations about Global Plants at the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) meeting in June in Berlin!

Thanks to the generosity of Panama-based Smithsonian Institution Tropical Research Institute and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we were able to provide funds as travel stipends for representatives of Global Plants partner institutions to attend SPNHC. The recipients included:… Read more»

New Collection: Plants & Society

We have proposed developing and launching a new content collection titled “Plants & Society.” It will be a multi-format resource center—including primary sources, journals, and books—that builds on JSTOR’s existing resources in Ecology, Botany, and the Plant Sciences to provide an innovative lens for examining the complex relationships of plants with nature, society, and humanity. This collection will focus on the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental implications and uses of plants, and will help researchers and students to position… Read more»

Connect with @JSTORPlants

@JSTORPlants on Twitter provides an open channel for discussion with the Global Plants community about all things botanical. Each week we highlight content in Global Plants and promote research and events relevant to the Global Plants partner network. We try to feature and retweet content about our partner institutions, so next time you’re tweeting about an awesome event at your institution, or a paper you publish, let us know! Read more»

Books at JSTOR partners with the Theological Book Network

The Theological Book Network and JSTOR have entered into an innovative partnership to offer ebooks from 17 leading scholarly publishers to ten theological seminaries in India, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. The Theological Book Network worked closely with librarians to identify 250 works in theology, biblical studies, church history, and Christian-Muslim engagement to include in this project.

The publishers who contributed are:… Read more»

Global Plants at European Botanical Horticultural Libraries Group

We were thrilled to attend the European Botanical & Horticultural Libraries (EBHL) Group annual meeting held at Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh in April of 2016. Many Global Plants partners attended the EBHL meeting: Botanic Garden Meise, Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Cambridge University, Chicago Botanic Garden, Conservatoire et Jardin Botaniques de la Ville de Geneve, Harvard University, Linnean Society of London, Missouri Botanical Garden, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, The New York Botanical Garden,… Read more»

Celebrate when history became herstory, too

Did you know that it wasn’t until the 1970s when the first courses in Women’s History were created? Among the scholarly pioneers was Gerda Lerner, a historian who made it her mission to spearhead the first Women’s Studies programs. Thanks to Lerner and other visionaries at the time, we retraced our steps in history to find women’s footprints too, and thus an essential field of study was born.

Visit JSTOR’s scholarly news magazine, JSTOR Daily, to learn about the… Read more»

Welcoming botany & plant science publishers

Earlier this year we launched our Plants eBook Collection at JSTOR. It includes 242 books from over 50 publishers, including University of California Press, Columbia University Press, Yale University Press, and University of Pennsylvania Press. The collection is divided into five thematic sets:

The collection is fully customizable so libraries can pick and choose… Read more»

Artstor-ITHAKA Community Letter

To our creators, partners, and users:

We are writing to you as a valued member of our community to share the good news that Artstor, the not-for-profit provider of the Artstor Digital Library of images and the Shared Shelf platform for cataloguing and digital asset management, will now operate under the umbrella of its fellow not-for-profit ITHAKA, the organization that currently operates three other services: JSTOR, Portico and Ithaka S+R. As you may know, Artstor,… Read more»

Inside Higher Ed examines growth in JSTOR’s ebook program

The Books at JSTOR program is growing quickly and now offers 40,000 titles from 100 participating publishers. A recent article in Inside Higher Ed attributes the program’s success to the popularity of the JSTOR platform among student and faculty researchers, which helps increase discovery of the ebooks. The article also discusses JSTOR’s DRM-free model, the financial benefits to libraries, the increase in foreign-language content, and more.

Read the full article… Read more»

New content: Botanische Staatssammlung München artwork

We are delighted to let you know we have added two new unique collections to Global Plants:

Botanische Staatssammlung München Artwork – Water Colours of Fungi by Fritz Wohlfarth

This collection consists of watercolors of fungi painted by Fritz Wohlfarth (1906–2005). Dr. Fritz Wohlfarth studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany) and obtained a Ph.D. degree in chemistry. For many years he worked as a field sales representative for a varnish company in Munich. During his tours around Germany and… Read more»

New publishers added to Books at JSTOR–and more news

Books at JSTOR has seen tremendous growth over the course of 2015. One hundred leading scholarly publishers now participate in the program, contributing 38,000 titles—including 2,250 published in 2015. Library participation has increased to more than 700 institutions in 40 countries. Read on for additional highlights from this year.

New publishers: JSTOR has partnered with 100 distinguished presses. We are pleased to welcome the publishers that joined in November/December:

Anthem Press
Aspen Institute
Gerlach Press
Intellect… Read more»

New tools for interdisciplinary researchers

December 8, 2015—New York, NY and Seattle, WA—The JSTOR Labs team recently partnered with Dr. Jevin West’s team at the University of Washington DataLab to test and develop tools to help researchers introduce themselves to key topics and publications from other fields. The results of their work have been incorporated into JSTOR Sustainability—a new site, currently in beta, that contains a broad range of scholarly articles and research reports dealing with environmental stresses and their impact on… Read more»

Annotating all knowledge, JSTOR joins coalition of innovators

JSTOR is part of a newly formed coalition of organizations working to annotate the web. This group of 40+ knowledge platforms, libraries, and publishers is being led by fellow not-for-profit Hypothes.is.

Read more about this effort in Nature and on hypothes.is, which features a series of video interviews that give insight into the community of collaborators and where JSTOR’s own Alex Humphreys discusses the importance of learning by doing as we try to make web annotation a powerful new… Read more»

JSTOR announces fees for 2016

Teach about Plant Blindness

A world without plants? Would you like to learn more about Plant Blindness and teaching about it in the classroom?  JSTOR has some resources for you to help you get started. Read more»

Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition

Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition is a beta site built by JSTOR Labs in collaboration with JSTOR’s Content Development team based on David Livingstone’s African expedition along the Zambezi and Shire Rivers from 1858-1864. The site provides students, teachers, and scholars with a greater understanding of the scientific, historical, and cultural contexts of the expedition, offering users both a high-level overview of the expedition and the ability to perform a detailed analysis of the materials.

The resource brings together content from JSTOR… Read more»

Partner interview: María Mercedes Arbo

We interviewed long-time Global Plants partner and respected taxonomist María Mercedes Arbo, who told us about the evolution of botanical research from the 1970s to today and mused about the direction botany might be headed. Among other topics, Dr. Arbo discussed the role of technology and best practices for effective research. As a respected botanist in your field with a long career, you must marvel at what can now be done through projects like Global Plants. How have you seen this have the greatest impact on the work of botanists? I began working in Plant Taxonomy around 1972, in Corrientes, where Botanical Research had started in 1965. The Herbarium was just beginning, and the Library was very small. The main Argentine Botanical Libraries were located at Buenos Aires, 1000 km away. In those years not even photocopies were common. I still keep the photocopy of Urban’s monography on Turneraceae (1883), which I got in Buenos Aires (Darwinian Institute), made on a special photosensible paper. You could request material on loan to each Herbarium, but it wasn't easy, depended on surface or airmail, you had to write a letter, wait sometimes several months to receive an answer, and loans, logically, were partial. In those years, almost the only way to study a good number of the nomenclatural types was to travel to Europe to visit the herbaria of various countries, with different currency and legal standards... Read more»

Global Plants at Botany 2015

We were proud to exhibit for the fifth year in a row at the Botanical Society of America’s annual conference in Edmonton, Canada. The conference provides an excellent venue for us to meet with users, participants, and partners, and discuss their needs and our future plans. It is also a great opportunity to see many of our North American partners in person and to meet faculty and students who are using Global Plants. (A group of graduate students from… Read more»

In the lab: Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition

JSTOR Global Plants has gotten very big--at last count some 2,222,000 plant type specimens and 245,000 primary sources were contained within it. That enormity has helped it to become an indispensable resource for plant taxonomists and botanists but can be overwhelming to non-specialists. At the GPI conference last September, our team spoke with many partners about the potential for highlighting smaller segments of Global Plants content, such as specimens and historical documents from a single expedition, and it was exciting how many shared our enthusiasm. Read more»

Sponsor profile: Shelley James & BISH

Shelley James is a Curator and Expedition Leader at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum’s Herbarium Pacificum (BISH) in Honolulu, Hawaii. She met with us to talk about her work and tell us why she chose to sponsor access to Global Plants for the National Herbarium at the Papua New Guinea Forest Institute (LAE). The two institutions have a long history of collaboration, and the Museum's expeditions to Papua New Guinea date back to its founding in 1889. Read more»