The "moving wall" represents the time period between the last issue available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal. It is specified by publishers in their license agreements with JSTOR, and generally ranges from three to five years. In calculating the moving wall the current, incomplete year is not counted. Through the moving wall, JSTOR seeks to avoid jeopardizing publishers' subscriptions and revenue opportunities from current and recent material, while also enabling libraries and researchers to rely on JSTOR as a trusted archive, providing both preservation and access for journals after a reasonable period of time. This balancing of interests among publishers, libraries, and scholars is at the center of our approach to pursuing JSTOR's mission and goals.

JSTOR has been archiving journals in the life sciences since the organization's earliest days. In fact, immediately following the completion of Arts & Sciences I in 1999, our next releases were the General Science and Ecology & Botany Collections. While JSTOR has focused mainly on archiving humanities and social sciences journals since then, we have been encouraged by the scholarly community to continue building up our strong base in the sciences. In a 2002 survey of library participants, biology ranked as the number one scientific discipline for future development in JSTOR and, in the years since the release of the Ecology & Botany Collection, more than one hundred publishers and scholarly organizations in the field have expressed interest in archiving their journals with us. Given this interest, JSTOR began working to significantly expand its coverage and in April 2005 announced the creation of the new Biological Sciences Collection.

The Biological Sciences Collection will bring together the twenty-nine journals currently available in the Ecology & Botany Collection and more than seventy titles new to JSTOR. At this writing, thirty-seven titles (nearly 1.5 million pages) have been released in the archive, and an additional forty-four journals (1.2 million pages) have agreed to participate and will be digitized and released periodically through the end of 2007. The collection will ultimately include more than one hundred journals. New titles add depth to JSTOR's coverage of botany and plant sciences, paleontology, aquatic sciences, and ecology and evolutionary biology, while introducing zoology (including mammalogy, herpetology, ornithology, and entomology) and cell biology. Out of the eighty-one journals that have agreed to participate thus far, twelve were published before 1900, with the oldest title, The Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, beginning publication in 1841. Most journals are participating with three to five year moving walls, although a few are shorter or longer than this.

In developing this collection, JSTOR partnered with two leading organizations in biological sciences research and publishing: the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and BioOne. Similar to their work with the Ecology & Botany Collection, the ESA assembled a committee of scholars to review and recommend journals, in addition to securing a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a portion of the digitization costs. BioOne is the online host for a considerable number of journals and joined in this collaboration by facilitating the inclusion of many of these publications in the JSTOR archive. In the future we plan to develop cross-site searching and article-level links between BioOne and JSTOR, so that users will be able to move seamlessly between the current issues in BioOne and the archived content in JSTOR.

The response to the April 13 announcement of the Biological Sciences Collection has been very positive. Within several weeks of the collection's introduction, more than one hundred institutions have chosen to participate. Teri Koch, Collection Development Librarian at Drake University's Cowles Library, considers their uptake of the Biological Sciences Collection to be "an important strategic advantage" for the university's students and faculty. "We are always looking for efficient ways to buttress our holdings in the life sciences, and JSTOR's holdings complement our existing print, as well as other electronic journal holdings," she says. "By adding this collection, we have added core titles in key areas, as well as filled in gaps of titles we already own. Our users are excited about the opportunity to digitally search these titles and the opportunities for expanding their research efforts that this will present." In addition to the interest expressed by current participants in JSTOR, it is hoped that the Biological Sciences Collection also will appeal to a broader constituency of scholars and researchers working in the biological sciences.

Publishers in this field have also welcomed the opportunity to preserve their journals and to make them available to a diverse group of users in a multidisciplinary research environment. "It seemed the ideal solution for our needs in meeting [article] requests, and of course in preserving the journal long-term in archival fashion," says Dr. Theodore Wachs, Managing Editor of Mountain Research and Development. "We have been applauded for our decision by a member of the Board of the International Mountain Society, one of our copyright holders, and the final editorial authority for MRD. This Board member had heard from one of our authors about the superior services offered by JSTOR for downloading and dissemination, and how this would be a wonderful enhancement for MRD."

As with all JSTOR collections, academic institutions will pay two fees to participate in the Biological Sciences Collection, an Archive Capital Fee (ACF) and an Annual Access Fee (AAF). The ACF is a one-time-only fee designed to help ensure that JSTOR has the necessary resources to meet its archival mission as technology evolves. The AAF helps cover the recurring costs of updating the archive, and maintaining access and support services for participating institutions. JSTOR participants that already participate in the Ecology & Botany Collection may migrate to the Biological Sciences Collection. The ACF which they contributed for Ecology & Botany will be applied to the ACF for Biological Sciences, so that all participants only contribute an ACF once for any JSTOR title. Additionally, in recognition of the six titles shared between the Biological Sciences Collection and the Arts & Sciences I Collection, fees are reduced for institutions participating in both collections.

We are very happy to facilitate the growth and diversification of the JSTOR archive with this new collection. Participation fee information about the Biological Sciences Collection for participants is available on the JSTOR website.

Last updated on September 8, 2006