On June 1^st, 1997, JSTOR welcomed the Australian National University (ANU) as its first Australian participant. Not only was ANU the first participant within Australia to support JSTOR's archiving initiative in its early years, but it was also the first higher education institution participant outside of the United States and Canada.

This past summer, the Council of Australian University Libraries (CAUL), with funding made possible by the Australian government through the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative fund in the Department of Education, Science, and Training (DEST), announced plans to proceed with national participation in JSTOR for all 39 Australian universities. The agreement will bring more than 400 of the titles in the JSTOR archive to the students, faculty, and researchers served by the CAUL member institutions. According to Eve Woodberry, chair of the CAUL Electronic Information Resources Committee and University Librarian at the University of New England:

The agreement with JSTOR provides the first national site license for higher education in Australia to include all universities. This is something CAUL has been aiming for since it began its cooperative purchasing program in the mid-1990s. JSTOR was identified by university libraries as the preferred product for negotiations following a survey of CAUL members, and we are delighted that the government has agreed to provide funding.

The agreement with CAUL will provide the Australian universities with access to over 16 million pages of content from the 419 titles in 35 disciplines currently available in the multi-disciplinary Arts & Sciences collections. With the addition of the Australian universities, almost 900 of the more than 2,200 participating JSTOR institutions now come from 86 countries outside the U.S.

Further information about CAUL can be found at http://www.caul.edu.au/

Last updated on September 8, 2006