For organizations with a mission to pursue the widest possible access to scholarly literature, it is an advantageous time. Digital technologies have brought vast amounts of research from the library shelves onto the desktops of millions. All around us are new opportunities to meaningfully improve people's work and research.

JSTOR is engaged in a series of strategic discussions aimed at doing a great deal more to facilitate research and access for the academic community and the general public. One early conclusion is that we should make the literature in the archive findable by users from wherever they choose to conduct their research. Fulfilling this goal requires a series of steps that we have already begun to enact. The first has been to deploy a new technical capability that facilitates federated searching of JSTOR with other library holdings. Soon we will also release a 'crawl site' to enable indexing of full-text articles. The site is intended for public search engines, but may also prove useful to participating publishers and libraries.

Looking ahead, more individuals—including many unaffiliated with participating institutions or publishers—will be exposed to the literature in the archive. We believe we can meet their needs more effectively than we do today. By 2006, users not authorized to access full-text articles will see something new. They will still receive a citation and, in the very limited cases where one exists, an abstract. Wherever possible, users will also be able to read the first page of an article. We hope this "glimpse" will aid users in evaluating articles in the context of their work and, over time, that we might guide them on how or where to access the articles they deem relevant—whether from JSTOR, the publisher, or a library.

Your comments and ideas are welcome.

Michael P. Spinella

Last updated on September 8, 2006