JSTOR - Usage and Contents

Usage and Contents

JSTOR is licensed mainly to libraries, universities, and publishers. Individual subscriptions are also available to certain journal titles through the journal publisher.

As of November 2010, JSTOR material is provided by 692 publishers. More than 90 million searches of the archives were performed between January 1 and July 12, 2010. In addition to its use as an archive for individual journals, JSTOR has also been used as a resource for linguistics research to investigate trends in language use over time.

The availability of nearly all journals on JSTOR is controlled by a "moving wall", which is an agreed-upon delay between the current volume of the journal and the latest volume available on JSTOR. This time period is specified by agreement between JSTOR and the publisher and is usually 3–5 years. Publishers can request that the period of a "moving wall" be changed or request discontinuation of coverage. Formerly publishers could also request that the "moving wall" be changed to a "fixed wall" – a specified date after which JSTOR would not add new volumes to its database. As of November 2010, "fixed wall" agreements were still in effect with three publishers of 29 journals made available online through sites controlled by the publishers.

In addition to the main site, JSTOR's labs group operates an open service that allows access to the contents of the archives for the purposes of corpus analysis at its Data for Research service. This site offers a search facility with graphical indication of the article coverage and loose integration into the main JSTOR site. Users can create focused sets of articles and then request a dataset containing word and n-gram frequencies and basic metadata. They are notified when the dataset is ready and can download it in either XML or CSV formats. The service does not offer full-text, though academics can request that from JSTOR subject to a non-disclosure agreement.

JSTOR Plant Science is available in addition to the main site. JSTOR Plant Science provides access to content such as plant type specimens, taxonomic structures, scientific literature, and related materials and aimed at those researching, teaching or studying botany, biology, ecology, environmental and conservation studies. The materials on JSTOR Plant Science are contributed through the Global Plants Initiative (GPI) and are accessible only to JSTOR and GPI members. Two partner networks are contributing to this: the African Plants Initiative which focuses on plants from Africa and the Latin American Plants Initiative which contributes plants from Latin America.