RE: AAAS and JSTOR issues

["Michael Spinella" <Michael.Spinella@jstor.org>]

We value the discussion among listserv participants that has been 
sparked by David Carlson's posting regarding AAAS's decision to 
withdraw from JSTOR.  As there have been several questions about 
our business model and agreements with publishers, we wanted to 
address and clarify some of the points raised by recent responses 
on the listserv and queries we have received.

First, JSTOR has not developed a model for licensing the archive 
to for-profit institutions, and a handful of our publisher 
agreements prohibit us from making their back files available to 
this market. We have considered providing access to corporate 
libraries for the other titles and are open to exploring this 
idea with our participating publishers. In late 2006, we gave 
publishers the option to sell single articles through JSTOR. 
Roughly one-third of the journals in JSTOR are now including 
articles in this program and we believe this does meet some of 
the demand from corporate markets.

We want to emphasize that JSTOR does not have exclusive 
arrangements with any publishers.  Participating publishers are 
free to undertake other digitization and access projects or to 
license their content to other parties as they deem appropriate. 
Since its inception, JSTOR has been careful to consider the need 
for publishers to remain independent in pursuing their goals and 
business interests. The Moving Wall concept and programs enabling 
publishers to make their legacy content available to individual 
subscribers or members are examples of our approach. JSTOR has 
developed a content sharing program for publishers to enable them 
to use their legacy content as digitized by JSTOR to pursue their 
missions and goals without having to apply their own financial or 
staff resources to the digitization effort. (See our 2006 
newsletter article about this at 
http://news.jstor.org/jstornews/2006/03/march_2006_no_10_issue_1_conte.html)

One posting mentioned the possibility of relying on OpenURL 
linking and foregoing the need for curated aggregations of 
journal content. We certainly agree that there is value in 
finding better ways to aid users looking for content that may be 
widely distributed across the web. Even so, we believe there is 
value in aggregation, particularly in ensuring the viability and 
authenticity of an essential body of scholarly output over time. 
Long-term preservation and continued accessibility of the content 
in the archive are core features of JSTOR's mission. Therefore, a 
key component of all our publisher agreements is that, should a 
publisher terminate its agreement with JSTOR, the material 
included in the archive up to the point of termination will 
remain in the archive and will continue to be preserved by JSTOR 
and accessible to those institutions participating in the 
collection housing the content at the time of termination.

Libraries with access to JSTOR's Health & General Sciences 
Collection in 2007 will continue to have access to Science 
(1880-2002) for the long term.  Libraries relying on JSTOR as 
their archive can make decisions about moving print copies off 
site or de-accessioning and rest assured that journal volumes in 
the archive today will be there in the future. We also 
continually invest in making the archive more useful to 
researchers. For example, we are nearing completion of a very 
large project to identify and parse references throughout the 
24-million-page archive to enable reference linking.

Finally, we have been encouraged by the awareness that the 
aggregated nature of the JSTOR archive enables users to discover 
material relevant to their research in disciplinary fields they 
might not have otherwise explored. As boundaries between 
disciplines become more porous, this is especially important. We 
have received very positive feedback on the value of a "curated" 
collection and of the knowledge that material included in the 
JSTOR archive is from vetted sources. We were disappointed by 
AAAS's decision in part because we believe, as Margaret Landesman 
posited in her post, that inclusion in the archive made Science 
discoverable to a diverse audience of humanists and social 
scientists, while also providing a good complement to the 100+ 
sciences journals in the archive. However, we do not believe that 
this decision was the harbinger of a changing outlook for JSTOR. 
Indeed, since the AAAS's decision, JSTOR has signed over 60 
additional titles-in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and 
sciences--from 26 publishers, including commercial and university 
presses, scholarly societies, and independent journals. The 
benefits of JSTOR participation continue to resonate with our 
over 460 publishers, and we continually work to develop new 
programs to help meet their objectives, and together to serve the 
scholarly community, in an increasingly digital landscape.

Michael Spinella, Executive Director and
Kimberly Lutz, Director of Publisher Relations
JSTOR