No. 10, Issue 2, JSTORNEWS, June 2006

"Born Digital" Journals in JSTOR

To many, JSTOR is synonymous with "digitized journal back issues." Librarians, publishers, and researchers have come to know and rely upon us for high-quality digitization, preservation, and reliable access to digital surrogates of print journals. The JSTOR archive today represents a kind of virtual library collection—one envisions aisle upon aisle of "stacks" containing 143,000 printed journal issues, cover-to-cover, spanning 350 years. What may be less apparent is that this print-based virtual library collection will soon include "born digital" journals.

Why?

Roughly 80% of the journals participating in JSTOR produce online editions today. While some mirror the print versions, representing a kind of identical twin, others are fraternal, clearly related but differing in significant ways. Authors, for example, may include data or audio clips with the online versions of their articles, and publishers may choose to produce high-expense items like color artwork exclusively online. Publishers are also beginning to eliminate print versions; one JSTOR participating journal, Mammalian Species, has already moved to electronic only distribution. Finally, new electronic-only journals are beginning to produce quality scholarship. Our goal is to ensure that the authoritative, complete version of a given journal or piece of scholarship is preserved for the long-term and to make certain that as many scholars and students as possible have access to reliable, trusted copies—regardless of the original publication format.

How?

For the past several years, we have been working to develop the capacity to ingest, preserve, and provide access to this new type of material. Our approach has focused on developing a "source file" archive, where we accept, normalize, and migrate the original electronic files produced by publishers to render their online journals. This capacity has been developed and is being deployed by JSTOR in cooperation with an affiliate not-for-profit service known as Portico. Portico grew out of the JSTOR Electronic Archiving Initiative, and it is now the organizational home of the source file preservation infrastructure that has been developed. JSTOR and Portico are working closely together: JSTOR relies on Portico to ingest and to preserve electronic journals that will be part of the JSTOR collections; meanwhile, responsibility for rendering this content online and providing access rests with JSTOR.

What will be different?

Introducing born digital journals into JSTOR will bring changes for all of our constituents. Today, publishers enable JSTOR to preserve their material and to stay current with the moving wall by adding us to their subscription list. Providing us with their electronic journals will require that we build an understanding of their source file structure and develop new processes and software to ingest this material into the archive. It will also require that we receive regular data feeds and discuss any upcoming changes publishers may make to their files or data structures. Prior to beginning this work, we will need to add new provisions to our publisher license agreements.

The user experience will also be different. Given that we already provide access to digitized print titles, incorporating the electronic versions presents special challenges. In re-designing the JSTOR interface, we are asking questions like the following: What impact will having multiple "authoritative" versions of an article have on the user experience? Which version should be set as the default? What are the implications for article citation? Also, JSTOR focuses on reproducing the "look and feel" of printed volumes as we convert journals to digital form. As we begin to display electronic journals, we will no longer be able to take this approach. We expect to deliver all of the intellectual components of the publication and to provide context about the relationships among them (i.e. this article references this image); we will not, however, be able to maintain specific fonts and colors or banner ads—the elements of traditional "look and feel."

Finally, we will need to assess what elements can and should be subject to some form of standardization. Today, JSTOR has control over the digitization of content and, therefore, is able to capture and present data in consistent ways. For example, we use the same capitalization and naming conventions for metadata across all participating journals. As we begin to bring in content created digitally by others, the effort involved in making this data consistent may seem unnecessary or be undesirable given the potential investment required.

When?

Our initial focus has been on establishing the capacity to support the preservation and delivery of born digital content. The Portico preservation infrastructure is now in place, and JSTOR is building the corresponding journal rendition and display capabilities. We will deploy the delivery platform for the Portico service within the next two months. In the meantime, we continue to resolve issues surrounding the integration of both print- and digitally-born content in the JSTOR interface. We have begun to share some preliminary conclusions and mock-ups with publisher and library participants, and encourage those who would like to be part of this review process to get in touch with us at support@jstor.org.

We anticipate providing access to a first set of electronic journals in JSTOR during 2007. JSTOR worked with a small, enterprising pilot group of publishers who provided data for the development of the Portico preservation infrastructure. Several will be among the first to have their electronic journals made accessible in JSTOR. We are also in discussion with publishers who have pressing needs for e-preservation either because of the content make-up of their electronic versions or an intention to move quickly to e-only publishing. Given the number of titles participating in JSTOR and the diverse set of content sources, we anticipate introducing electronic journals into JSTOR over several years.

We look forward to continuing to share our progress with our participants and to hearing your feedback.

Portico is affiliated with JSTOR and shares its deep commitment to the preservation of scholarship. In addition to providing the preservation infrastructure for journals in JSTOR, Portico offers a service that provides an opportunity for publishers and libraries to use this same infrastructure to preserve a much broader set of journals than JSTOR encompasses today. The terms of this service differ in important ways from JSTOR. For more information see www.portico.org.