JSTOR's annual Participating Publishers Meeting was held on Tuesday, May 17th in New York City. Ninety-five people attended the event this year, making it our largest meeting to date. On the afternoon of Monday May 16th, we also welcomed twenty-two publishers to a "new-to-JSTOR" workshop, followed by an evening wine-and-cheese reception open to all and held at the JSTOR offices. As in past years, these events provided publishers with a chance to interact with their colleagues and to meet JSTOR staff, to learn about recent initiatives at JSTOR, and to explore important developments in scholarly publishing and research.

Several outside speakers presented at this year's meeting. Donald Waters kicked off the day with an overview of strategic issues in scholarly communications from his perspective as Program Officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He was followed in the morning by Carol Tenopir from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee. Carol presented her research on the impact of electronic resources on faculty and student behavior. Two significant new collaborations were highlighted in the afternoon: Rebecca Simon from University of California Press described various projects being undertaken through a partnership between the press and the California Digital Library, and David S. Ferriero of the New York Public Library discussed the Google Print project and the library's commitment to have Google digitize a diverse set of volumes from its collection.

In addition to these talks, JSTOR staff also discussed several new initiatives related to preservation and access, as well as a legal update. Michael Spinella, JSTOR's Executive Director, updated attendees on the key elements of JSTOR's archiving strategy. As part of this discussion, he introduced Eileen Fenton, the Executive Director of an affiliate project, Portico, who described their ongoing efforts to preserve "born digital" or electronic versions of journals. JSTOR staff also described the organization's efforts to reach out to new communities and to create more pathways to the archive via links and public search engines. Finally, Nancy Kopans, JSTOR's General Counsel, shared an update on a recent court case Faulkner v. National Geographic Society. The issues raised in this case have important ramifications for digitization efforts in the scholarly community. JSTOR submitted a friend of the court brief to help educate the Court on how these issues are relevant to our community and the desirability of a particular outcome in the case.

Last updated on September 8, 2006