JSTOR - History

History

JSTOR was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. The founder, William G. Bowen, was the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988. Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals. By digitizing many journal titles, JSTOR allowed libraries to outsource the storage of these journals with the confidence that they would remain available for the long term. Online access and full-text search ability improved access dramatically. JSTOR was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites, and originally encompassed ten economics and history journals. JSTOR access was improved based on feedback from its initial sites, and it became a fully searchable index accessible from any ordinary Web browser. Special software was put in place to make pictures and graphs clear and readable.

With the success of this limited project, Bowen and Kevin Guthrie, then-president of JSTOR, were interested in expanding the number of participating journals. They met with representatives of the Royal Society of London, and an agreement was made to digitize the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society back to its beginning in 1665. The work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000. As of November 2, 2010 (2010 -11-02), the database contained 1,289 journal titles in 20 collections representing 53 disciplines, and 303,294 individual journal issues, totaling over 38 million pages of text. JSTOR is now supported by 6,425 participating libraries.

On July 19, 2011, internet activist Aaron Swartz was charged with data theft in relation to an alleged theft of academic journal articles from JSTOR. According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR". Prosecutors in the case say Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites. Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleaded not guilty to all counts and was released on $100,000 bail. Prosecution of the case is ongoing.

Two days later, on July 21, Greg Maxwell published a torrent file of a 32GB archive of 18,592 academic papers from JSTOR's Royal Society collection, via The Pirate Bay, in protest against Swartz' prosecution.

On September 7, 2011, JSTOR announced that they are releasing the public domain content of their archives (about 6% of the total) to the public. According to JSTOR, they have been working on making those archives public for some time, and the recent controversy made them "press ahead" with this initiative.