JSTOR” stands for “Journal Storage" and is a protected electronic archive of leading journals across many academic disciplines. It provides text-searchable, high-quality .pdf facsimiles of each journal article from a publication's inception up to the past 3-5 years. JSTOR’s mission is to preserve and offer user-friendly access to scholarship at a cost reasonable to libraries. It is different from other journal platforms in that it is a not-for-profit initiative undertaken by academic institutions working collaboratively to provide high-quality digital versions of standard scholarly journals collected by most libraries. Moreover, JSTOR has a preservation goal to house the content of these journals in digital form over the long term with perpetual access.
Founded in 1995, JSTOR now contains digitized back issues of roughly 2,000 academic journals from about 900 standard publishers in about 50 subject disciplines. Today JSTOR also serves as a digital platform for some scholarly books and primary source materials.
The availability of most journals in JSTOR is controlled by a "moving wall," which is an agreed-upon delay between the most current issues of the journal and the latest volume available in JSTOR. This period is specified by agreement between JSTOR and the journal's publisher, usually 3-5 years. Publishers may request that the period of a "moving wall" be changed or request discontinuation of coverage. In 2010, JSTOR started adding current issues of specific journals through its Current Scholarship Program.
JSTOR is related to and covered by Portico, the aforementioned community-supported “dark archive” for e-journals, e-books, digitized collections, and other forms of electronic scholarly content.
