No. 10, Issue 1, JSTORNEWS, March 2006

Content Sharing For Publishers

In the ten years since our inception, we have witnessed the Internet's spectacular growth as a tool for scholarly research, offering us increasing opportunities to collaborate with other organizations to broaden access to scholarly resources online. These collaborations have taken many forms. For example, we work with a growing number of abstracting and indexing databases, such as the Modern Language Association's International Bibliography or MathSciNet, to establish links directly from those databases into JSTOR. And we have established individual access programs for the members of scholarly societies to access their societies' back issues in JSTOR.

Increasingly, JSTOR is also working with publishers who are interested in using the digitized back files of their participating titles for a host of projects designed to re-purpose the materials and reach new audiences. The Society for American Archaeology, for instance, used files from JSTOR to create three print anthologies of classic articles from American Antiquity. As part of their recent website redesign, the Botanical Society of America (BSA) incorporated JSTOR's JPEG files of the cover images from the American Journal of Botany. These images are now available on the BSA website for teachers to use as instructional tools in their classrooms.

Working together, JSTOR can help participating publishers better meet the needs of scholars in their communities, and with this in mind, we recently began a more comprehensive content sharing program with publishers. Through this program, publishers may receive the full back-runs of their journals digitized by JSTOR, including the ASCII files and basic metadata. While the program is quite new, we are excited by the ways publishers are beginning to use these files and would like to profile two examples.

The first journal to request the files was the American Journal of Nursing (AJN), the oldest and largest continuously published nursing journal. Published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), a division of Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc., the journal serves a large number of academics and researchers as well as nurses and other working professionals in the field. Given their large subscriber base and the fact that many of their subscribers may not be affiliated with academic institutions, the AJN has sought to broaden access to its current issues by offering their articles through a number of online resources. Currently, the AJN's website makes all recent issues from 1996 to the present available to subscribers, and these are also available through Ovid, LWW's platform. Additionally, the portal NursingCenter.com, a resource geared to the continuing education activities of nurses, offers AJN articles on a pay-per-view basis.

The AJN also believed that their readers might be interested in easily locating articles from the journal's long history but found that digitizing all issues from their first volume in 1900 would be a daunting and time-consuming task. As Trish Losi, the Librarian/Information Specialist at Lippincott explained, when they learned about the content sharing program they realized that "JSTOR can do this for us." JSTOR is in the process of digitizing the back issues, and will make them available in the archive to participants in JSTOR's Health and General Sciences Collection in the summer of 2006. The AJN will also receive a copy and is planning to integrate their back files into a number of projects. Initially, all back articles will be available through pay-per-view on the NursingCenter.com portal. In addition, the AJN plans to highlight a selection of heavily used or cited classic articles on their own website as well as a number of articles that are of historical importance to researchers, including ones published during World Wars I and II.

The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), a JSTOR participating publisher since 1998, is also making plans to use the back files digitized by JSTOR. The IMS is deeply committed to lowering barriers to access for all of their titles, and has advocated the support of institutional repositories. As part of its current publishing program, the IMS sends authors PDFs of their articles upon publication to deposit in their institutional repositories. Additionally, the IMS makes its back issues from 1995-2003 freely available through their online platform, Project Euclid. Through the JSTOR content sharing program, the society intends to extend both of these activities. Authors of older articles will be able to post the articles on their personal websites or in their institutional repositories, and the IMS will make the complete back files freely available.

According to Elyse Gustafson, the Executive Director of the IMS, the content sharing program is "just what we were looking for. Authors will be given the authoritative versions of their articles, the back files will be accessible to an even larger audience, and we can continue to rely on JSTOR to integrate our journals with a wide range of scholarship and ensure their continued preservation." Through the program, the IMS will also have the opportunity to support other community efforts. Longer term plans for the files also include incorporating the journals' metadata in the Current Index to Statistics, a bibliographic index for publications in statistics and related fields.

JSTOR has always been pleased to collaborate with publishers to digitize, preserve, and extend access to journals. Through the content sharing program and other special projects with publishers, as well as JSTOR's outreach efforts to libraries, the journals are reaching a wider audience than ever. We look forward to working further with participating publishers on additional projects and initiatives for the scholarly research community. For more information on JSTOR's content sharing program, please contact JSTOR Publisher Relations at pr@jstor.org.