What lessons were learned from the first phase of JSTOR’s development? JSTOR’s original mission was to save storage space and thereby library costs, a mission that expanded immediately to improving access to the literature. JSTOR was incubated at both the University of Michigan and the Mellon Foundation. What role did the University play? Could JSTOR have been built without the active involvement of a foundation? Why was it seen as necessary to "spin off" the project? How did the grant project evolve into a successful marketplace enterprise? How was JSTOR able to serve its twofold mission of archiving its journals while also providing access to them? What accounted for its steady growth? And what implications are there for the economic and organizational aspects of preservation and archiving?  While a researcher at the Mellon Foundation, Ithaka’s current manager of research was tasked with exploring these questions to help the community learn from JSTOR’s experiences. The result was a book published in 2003 by Princeton University Press.

Publications:

• Roger C. Schonfeld, “JSTOR: A Case Study in the Recent History of Scholarly Communications,” Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems 39, no. 4 (October 2005): 337-344.
• Roger C. Schonfeld, JSTOR: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Presentation:

• Roger C. Schonfeld, “JSTOR: A Case Study in the Recent History of Scholarly Communications,” Digital Histories: The Annual Conference of the Association for History and Computing UK, The National Archives at Kew, November 27, 2004.