JSTOR began as a fix for libraries drowning in paper journals
By the early 1990s, university libraries were running out of shelf space and money for ever-multiplying academic journals. Princeton's former president William Bowen proposed digitising the back issues so libraries could stop storing them. His first plan used CD-ROMs, until a colleague persuaded him the internet was the better bet.
Bowen, who led Princeton from 1972 to 1988, founded JSTOR, short for Journal Storage, in 1994 with money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Princeton's computing chief Ira Fuchs argued that CD-ROMs were already dated and that network access would avoid duplication. The pilot launched in 1995 at seven library sites with just ten economics and history journals, readable in an ordinary web browser, with special software to keep charts legible.
It grew quickly. A deal with the Royal Society brought in its Philosophical Transactions all the way back to 1665, a job finished in December 2000. Today more than 900 publishers supply over 12 million articles across 75-plus disciplines, and in 2012 alone users ran nearly 152 million searches. Most journals appear behind a moving wall, a delay of typically three to five years before new issues are added. Since 2009 JSTOR has been part of the nonprofit Ithaka Harbors.
Access has always been the sore point. Institutions pay subscriptions, and JSTOR reportedly blocks 150 million attempts a year by non-subscribers. In 2010 and 2011 the programmer and activist Aaron Swartz used MIT's network to bulk-download a large share of the archive. JSTOR settled with him, but federal prosecutors pressed charges, and the case was unresolved when he died in January 2013.
That controversy helped push JSTOR to release its public domain material. From September 2011 more than 500,000 documents from over 200 journals, published before 1923 in the United States or before 1870 elsewhere, became free to all. Since then it has added limited free reading for registered users, a digital magazine, and a programme reaching more than a million people in jails and prisons by 2024.
Source: JSTOR
