News

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»

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.

Read the full article.… Read more»

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»