ABSTRACT
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 with a broad mission to help the scholarly community benefit from advances in electronic technologies. Its initial objective has been to build a database comprising the back volumes of important scholarly research journals. The goal in building this central electronic archive has been to lower the system-wide costs associated with storing and preserving these academic materials while simultaneously increasing their utility. Although originally a grant project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR does not rely on the foundation for its ongoing support; rather, it has developed an economic model designed to enable it to achieve financial self-sufficiency and to allow it to operate independently. In its first 9 years, JSTOR has made remarkable progress. In fact, it has been successful beyond anyone’s original expectations. As of October 2003, the archive contains nearly 13 million journal pages from 353 titles in 27 academic disciplines. More than 1800 academic institutions in 76 countries have licensed the database, contributing fees to support the preservation and ongoing maintenance of the archive. The organization continues to add more journals while also reaching out to new types of participating libraries and organizations all over the world and adapting to meet new types of archiving needs. It is fair to assert that there has been a clear endorsement in the scholarly community of JSTOR’s goal to serve as a trusted archive of electronic journal literature.
