A JSTOR success guide for libraries

Short description: JSTOR is a digital library of journals, academic ebooks, images, and primary sources.

Description: JSTOR is a digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and diverse primary sources. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also includes Ithaka S+R and Portico.

Keywords to describe JSTOR: digital library, interdisciplinary, full-text, scholarly, peer-reviewed (for most journal and ebook content).

JSTOR contains the full-text of more than 2,300 journals from 1,000 publishers, with publication dates ranging from 1665 to 2023 (for certain titles). Journals are available in more than 60 disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences and mathematics. 

JSTOR contains more than 100,000 ebooks from academic publishers. The ebooks work just like journals, offering unlimited use and DRM-free chapter downloads in PDF format.

Images on JSTOR are contributed by partnering institutions like universities, museums, and community and private collections, including the Artstor Digital Library. 

JSTOR now features audio content with searchable transcripts for spoken word content. If your search results contain audio items, you can filter your results for audio in the Refine Results sidebar under Primary Source Content. Explore The Chapel Collection from Tuskegee University to try out the audio experience on JSTOR.

JSTOR includes millions of primary sources across four collections:

• 19th Century British Pamphlets - This is a collection of more than 26,000 pamphlets published in the 19th century. They chronicle political and socioeconomic issues and debates of concern to Britain at the time, and the digitized files preserve images and contemporary annotations. For libraries that subscribe to 19th Century British Pamphlets, the content is available alongside the journals and ebooks.

• Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa - Struggles for Freedom is a collection of more than 20,000 objects that relate to liberation movements in six southern African countries. The objects include oral histories, speeches, nationalist publications, fully digitized books, and pamphlets. 

• World Heritage Sites: Africa - World Heritage Sites is a collection of visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites and rock art sites. The more than 50,000 objects in the collection include photographs, 3D models, GIS datasets, site plans, excavation reports, and other scholarly material.

• Global Plants - Global Plants is the world’s largest database of digitized, high-resolution plant type specimens, and also includes reference works and primary sources such as correspondences, diaries, botanical illustrations, and photographs. Global Plants is available at http://plants.jstor.org.

Free and open content on JSTOR includes books, journals, images, research reports, and more:

• JSTOR Shared Collections (previously Open Community Collections) - JSTOR Shared Collections are images and primary sources from the special collections of libraries, museums, and archives around the world.
• Open Access Books - 7,800+ Open Access ebooks from 90 publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press.
• Open Access Journals - Our growing collection of Open Access journals cover topical areas in sustainability and security studies, and offer broad coverage in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. 
• JSTOR’s Early Journal Content (EJC) - This content includes journals published prior to the last 95 years in the United States, or prior to the last 143 years if initially published internationally. 
• Research Reports - More than 39,000 research reports from over 140 policy institutes around the world are freely accessible to everyone on JSTOR. The open research reports are discoverable alongside journals, books, and primary sources, and are clearly labelled as their own content type. We continually add reports as they become available.

You can find more information and browse our open collections at JSTOR from the Open and Free Content page.