One of JSTOR's primary objectives is to make the archive available as widely as possible. Over the past several years, our outreach efforts to the international community have been quite successful. We now serve scholars at more than 900 participating institutions in 84 countries world-wide. Major research and academic institutions internationally rely on JSTOR to provide their scholars and students with access to essential research in a wide range of disciplines. Many libraries that never before had access to the complete back runs of the print journals included in JSTOR can now offer their users a comprehensive archive through a simple Internet connection. This is especially true for those research and academic institutions in the developing world.

As a not-for-profit organization with a mission to archive important scholarly journals, JSTOR is dedicated to the accessibility and preservation of this scholarly research far into the future. To ensure this, each institution is asked to contribute participation fees. We fully recognize, however, that libraries and institutions in various parts of the world may lack the financial means to afford electronic resources. As a partial solution, we have enthusiastically sought the support of various foundations and government agencies to facilitate JSTOR access to these institutions. As a result, institutions in Chile, China, parts of Eastern Europe, Greece, India, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam have been able to participate in JSTOR.

During 2003, JSTOR began to develop a broader strategy to increase awareness and build participation in the world's poorest countries. Our research led us to adopt the per capita Gross National Income (GNI) compiled by the World Bank as the leading indicator in helping us to determine the level of savings that we provide to our international participants. Furthermore, we updated our existing savings tiers to reflect the most recent data collected by the World Bank, which classifies countries in four tiers: High Income, Upper Middle Income, Lower Middle Income, and Low Income nations. These classifications are designated by the World Bank in reference to a country's particular economic development and performance. We will continue to update these savings tiers every five years, with our next update in 2008.

Prior to incorporating the more recent GNI data, JSTOR had three savings tiers that offered 20%, 35%, and 50% savings to international institutions. We have since created a fourth savings tier (65%) for the world's poorest 64 nations - countries with a GNI of below $770. To date, there are 140 institutions from 32 of the Low Income and Lower Middle Income nations participating in JSTOR.

In January, the Ford Foundation approved our grant proposal to fund JSTOR access to 24 public and private universities in South Asia (India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka). These institutions will be given the opportunity to license JSTOR's Arts & Sciences I and Arts & Sciences II collections. Under the terms of this grant, the Foundation will cover the Archive Capital Fees (ACF) for both collections and contribute a decreasing percentage of the Annual Access Fees (AAF) over a 3-year period. It is our expectation that the grant will allow these South Asian institutions to build a greater awareness and appreciation for the literature archived by JSTOR, increase faculty and student familiarity with online scholarly resources, and give the institutions sufficient time to budget for sustained access to JSTOR.

According to Dr. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Program Officer for Education, Arts and Culture, at the Ford Foundation's New Delhi office:

As studies have begun to convincingly demonstrate, one of the serious consequences of globalization in the higher education field is the growing digital divide between the North and the global South, India included . As knowledge increasingly supplants physical capital as the source of wealth, power and the good life, electronic archives, databases, and libraries that provide comprehensive access to information hold the key to the new networked society that is coming into being around us. Yet in places like India, and especially among those who are practitioners of the already disadvantaged social sciences and the humanities, the electronic knowledge movement has hardly taken hold. [This grant] is meant to catalyze the Indian human sciences community in this regard by demonstrating the value, power, and promise of making the digital turn in knowledge production, dissemination, and preservation.

In March, we received grant approval from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to extend access to 24 existing JSTOR participants in Russia and Belarus. With this grant renewal, the JSTOR/MacArthur grantee institutions will receive an additional three years of access to the Arts & Sciences I collection, and twelve institutions will be offered access to the Arts & Sciences II collection. All ACFs and AAFs for each collection for each institution will be funded entirely by the MacArthur Foundation.

According to John Slocum, Co-Director of the Initiative in the Russian Federation and Post-Soviet States (a project within the Foundation's Program on Global Security and Sustainability), who manages the MacArthur Foundation's grants to JSTOR:

A central focus of the MacArthur Foundation's work in Russia is strengthening the scholarly and policy analysis community, in the belief that a vibrant intellectual community is essential to a healthy and sustainable democratic society . Russia is well served by the further development of strong universities, throughout the country, where the teaching and research functions are fully integrated. Access to the scholarly resources available through JSTOR helps facilitate this process, and the MacArthur Foundation is proud to be in partnership with JSTOR in Russia.

Obviously, an organization of JSTOR's limited size and means has minimal impact on the very real technology barriers that continue to impede access to electronic scholarly resources in the poorest nations. These countries continue to suffer from unreliable power supplies, limited to non-existent network bandwidth, and often times, limited economic resources and infrastructure. Nevertheless, our ongoing efforts in South Asia and Russia inspire us to remain steadfast. With the continued support from a variety of philanthropic partners, national library initiatives, and the library and scholarly community in general, we are confident that we can broaden JSTOR access to scholars and students in the developing world.

Last updated on September 8, 2006