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»
JSTOR Selects Metafor Software
May 12, 2015 – Mountain View, CA and New York, NY – Metafor Software, a leading provider of real-time anomaly detection technology, and JSTOR today announced that JSTOR has adopted Metafor Software as a core component of its technology operations. JSTOR, a digital library that contains upwards of 50 million pages of content and serves millions of users annually, has implemented Metafor to speed awareness of problems in application performance and site usage and to enhance its monitoring of key metrics. Read more»
User profile: Gwenaël Le Bras
Gwenaël Le Bras was a database coordinator at the National Herbarium in Paris, acting as a liaison between the GPI team and the IT department of Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (MNHN), before moving on to work on the national French portal e-ReColNat. There, he currently divides his time between H SONNERAT (botany), ARTHROTER (arthropods) and INVMAR (marine invertebrates and terrestrial mollusks).
When Gwenaël told us what an impact working on Global Plants had had on his career (“Global Plants has been seeding competences in many different ways, and that's a side effect you may be proud of!” he told us), we asked him to fill us in on the details. During our interview, he revealed a commitment not only to his work but also to the continued process of learning and exploring at any given chance. Read more»
Now available: Arts & Sciences XIV
More than 30 new titles are already searchable on the platform
Dozens of institutions have already signed up for access since we announced the Arts & Sciences XIV Collection last month, and even more are in conversation with our Outreach team about starting access. JSTOR’s newest collection, Arts & Sciences XIV is devoted to the study of culture and communication. The collection supports research in Political Science, Language, Rhetoric & Communications, Archaeology & Anthropology, Asian Studies, and more. Some top titles now fully readable on JSTOR… Read more»
JPASS grows among genealogists
Among the new users now adopting JSTOR with a JPASS plan, genealogists have established a strong foothold. Often working independently, they cite JSTOR’s range of disciplines, historical depth, and reliability as valuable for their work. Thomas MacEntee, of the website GeneaBloggers, calls JPASS “easy to use and hard to stop.”
Don’t forget: scholarly societies whose publications are part of JPASS can extend a 50% discount to members. More than 80 societies currently participate, supporting scholarly research and access.… Read more»
How can data fuel discovery?
Data has transformed and personalized experience across all aspects of daily life. But what potential does it have to transform scholarly discovery? In a recent Scholarly Kitchen article, Ithaka S+R’s Roger Schonfeld examines the abundance of scholarly usage data now in existence and the opportunities and risks of exploiting this data to benefit researchers.
Linguistics journals find outlet on JSTOR Daily
Brace yourself for a humble-brag: JSTOR Daily‘s linguistics column, Lingua Obscura, has developed a loyal following. Lingua Obscura, a regular feature in the Daily newsletters, focuses on contemporary language patterns, including internet neologisms—think “stress-eating,” “rage-quitting,” and yes, “humble-bragging.”
Articles from the column have been picked up by the news website Reddit (“Young Women’s Language Patterns“), as well as a few linguistic blogs. This recent post on hip-hop was shared by the “NYT Now” app from the New York Times.
Want more articles from Daily? Sign up for our e-newsletter.… Read more»
Do online aggregators increase citations?
An article in the March 2015 issue of the Review of Economics and Statistics says that at least for economics scholarship between 1995 and 2005, the answer is yes. Authors Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder attribute JSTOR’s importance in increasing citations to the cross-section of journals it offers, its comprehensive backfile coverage, and its relatively early genesis as an online journal aggregator.… Read more»
Promote JSTOR to your users
Resources to help you get the word out about JSTOR at your library
Want to share your excitement for JSTOR with patrons and let them know what’s available? Help is on its way! JSTOR has developed a set of resources online that support librarians in promoting licensed content on JSTOR to students, faculty, and other patrons at their libraries.
Right now, our toolkits help librarians with newly licensed content. Resources include video tutorials, posters, graphics and ads for library websites,… Read more»
Global Plants in the classroom
Part of the shared mission of JSTOR and the Global Plants Initiative is to promote awareness and education in plant sciences, environmental science, and the history of science. For those who are just getting started in their study of plants, the volume of material in Global Plants can be intimidating. It is with this in mind that we created Global Plants in the Classroom as a way to share these materials and expose students to their possible uses. Above all, we want to encourage curiosity and exploration. Read more»
DRM-free, unlimited-user access for all ebooks
All 25,000 titles offered through Books at JSTOR are now available exclusively in a DRM-free, unlimited-user model. We decided to eliminate our single-user ebook offering late last year and have since worked with publishers to bring more of their books into our unlimited offering. Now, all of JSTOR’s ebooks provide educational institutions and libraries with the following benefits:
- Simultaneous online access for an unlimited number of users
- Unlimited DRM-free chapter downloads that never expire
- Unlimited printing and copy/paste
- No requirement for the user to log in or use special software
- Interlibrary loan for all ebook chapters
Partner profile: Kevin Thiele
Kevin Thiele is a systematist and taxonomist with a particular interest in Australian Proteaceae, Rhamnaceae, Viola and Hibbertia (Dilleniaceae). He is currently working on new Western Australian species and other taxonomic matters in Hibbertia, but notes that as a herbarium curator, there is rarely enough time in the day to complete all that has to get done and manage to do much “real work.” So, he does taxonomic work in between other tasks. For Kevin, this time is almost meditative: “By around 3:30 in the afternoon, to stop myself banging my head on the door or going completely barking mad, I disappear into a quiet corner of the vaults and work on taxonomy for a bit – it’s a wonderful salve for sanity.” Read more»
Welcome to the Global Plants Partner blog!
Are you a Global Plants Partner? Would you like to stay up to date on the Global Plants Initiative (GPI) and the progress JSTOR staff is making on the database? Then you're in the right place. Read more»
JSTOR moves to new platform
Santa Clara, CA and New York, NY — February 9, 2015 — ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways, is announcing jointly with Atypon®, a leading provider of software to the scientific and scholarly publishing industry, the move of the JSTOR digital library, including its related primary source collections, from Atypon’s Literatum platform to a new technology platform created by… Read more»