Open Access Books On Jstor Expanding Access To Research

Leo Migdal

-Dec 14, 2025, 4:32 AM

open access books on jstor expanding access to research

As a pioneer and leading platform for open access ebooks, JSTOR supports libraries and publishers in expanding free access to high-quality scholarly works. Rapidly growing titles from 145+ publishers Books at JSTOR’s open access (OA) ebook programs provide unparalleled value and access to high-quality content for institutions and scholars everywhere. Usage for over 1,000 licensed titles increased by an average of 5,500% following conversion to OA on JSTOR, and the average number of countries using these titles has increased 9x. JSTOR collaborates with university presses, research centers, and global organizations to actively pilot new OA ebook initiatives, addressing systemic challenges in scholarly publishing while supporting libraries and publishers, and the readers we serve. We’ve recently added more than ten thousand freely readable recent books from academic publishers to the extended shelves of The Online Books Page.

These online titles are provided by JSTOR’s Open Access Books collection, and represent the first large-scale automated inclusion of new monographs to our catalog. We’ll be updating the listings from this collection on a regular basis. (Most of our extended shelves imports, which also include collections like HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, get refreshed about once a month.) We’ll also continue to add individual recent academic books of interest, both from that collection and others, to our curated collection. (You’ll see individually-chosen additions in our new books listing.) Automated addition of JSTOR’s open access books will let us include many more new titles than we’d be able to do manually by ourselves. They’ll help our site’s readers find up to date information from experts on many subjects, complementing the historical sources and other older books also available in our catalog.

(As always, I recommend that information seekers also consult their local libraries to get a fuller understanding of the subjects our collection covers, since local libraries have many copyrighted books we can’t offer for... But we now also have a growing number of recent books you’re not likely to find, or obtain as easily, in your local library.) A growing number of academic and peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes are now available through open access. The Directory of Open Access Books now lists over 90,000 of them, and the related OAPEN site offers direct downloads of many such books as well, as do many individual publisher sites. We may expand our automated listings in the future to cover a wider array of open access academic titles. But I consider JSTOR’s collection to be a good starting point for automated imports, both because it includes over 140 high-quality publishers, and because it provides high-quality metadata.

That makes it relatively easy to integrate their offerings with the other books in our catalog, using similar author and subject headings, and avoiding redundant listings. As always, our “extended shelves” imports are subject to change and not guaranteed to be as persistent as the “curated collection” listings we catalog ourselves. But you can always request that we add specific titles you’re interested in to our curated collection, whether from JSTOR’s offerings or elsewhere. JSTOR has a growing collection of information resources that are freely and openly available to all readers (as well as resources they offer by subscription or by registered access). Along with JSTOR’s open access books, we also link to issues of many of the serials JSTOR offers, sometimes via JSTOR’s own Early Journal Content offerings, sometimes via other online providers. We’re also continuing to document the public domain status of serials from JSTOR and other providers in our Deep Backfile knowledge base, (You can use the “Contact us” links in our Deep Backfile tables...

My thanks to JSTOR, and to a growing number of publishers and authors, for making current scholarship freely available and discoverable! UML Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new institutional repository, UMass Lowell RAD (Research, Archives, and Data)! Search for books, journals, video, and non-print materials Search for a journal or ebook title in our electronic holdings Learn more about borrowing materials from other libraries More than 2,500 Open Access ebooks are now available through Jstor at no cost to libraries or users.

These titles reflect JSTOR’s high standards for quality content and are freely available for anyone in the world to use. Users won’t need to register or log in, and there are no DRM restrictions or limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing. The ebooks are also preserved in Portico, ensuring that they will be available to researchers in perpetuity. Path to Open, a pilot program to support the open access publication of new groundbreaking scholarly books that brings diverse perspectives and research to millions of people, will add 300 new books from 44... This includes titles from nine publishers new to Path to Open, with several that expand the initiative’s global coverage: Bristol University Press, Sydney University Press, Melbourne University Publishing, and Leiden University Press. University press books are marked by the richness, depth, and quality of the research and ideas they publish.

The 2024 list reflects timely, insightful topics aligned with high use disciplines on JSTOR—books like Resisting Olympic Evictions by Adam Talbot from Manchester University Press; School, Ideas, and Values in the Age of tl:dr... The diverse list includes works by scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary fields like public health and sustainability. Faculty and students at Path to Open participating libraries will gain access to the 2024 books on JSTOR immediately upon publication, adding to the 2023 list of 100 books already available. All Path to Open books will become open access three years after publication. “By the end of this year, we’ll have helped hundreds of new and experienced faculty authors reach millions of researchers through a business model that ensures long-term open access to important research and ideas,”... “It’s still early days, but Path to Open shows significant promise and is a tremendous demonstration of how our community of nonprofit presses, libraries, and organizations can come together to build affordable, high-impact solutions.”

Now in year 2 of a multi-year pilot, Path to Open is progressing toward its goal of creating a scalable, sustainable model for open access book publishing. To learn more about the program from members of the Path to Open community and learnings to date, join our free upcoming Library Journal webinar: As a pioneer and leading platform for open access ebooks, JSTOR supports libraries and publishers in expanding free access to high-quality scholarly works. Rapidly growing titles from 145+ publishers Books at JSTOR’s open access (OA) ebook programs provide unparalleled value and access to high-quality content for institutions and scholars everywhere. Usage for over 1,000 licensed titles increased by an average of 5,500% following conversion to OA on JSTOR, and the average number of countries using these titles has increased 9x.

JSTOR collaborates with university presses, research centers, and global organizations to actively pilot new OA ebook initiatives, addressing systemic challenges in scholarly publishing while supporting libraries and publishers, and the readers we serve. Publishers, libraries, and faculty alike have realized their shared goals with the help of a new OA book publishing model from JSTOR, a mission-driven, nonprofit service of ITHAKA committed to making information more affordable... ‘Path to Open’ is Making OA Book Publishing Scalable and Sustainable for Syracuse University—and Beyond Like many smaller academic publishers, Syracuse University Press was looking for a way to make open access (OA) publishing sustainable for books and other monographs. At the same time, the university’s library system wanted to support the OA movement beyond access to journal articles—and faculty wanted a way to make their published books more widely available, while still being... Publishers, libraries, and faculty alike have realized their shared goals with the help of a new OA book publishing model from JSTOR, a mission-driven, nonprofit service of ITHAKA committed to making information more affordable...

The pilot program is called Path to Open, and it was developed in collaboration with a community advisory committee guided by the shared goals of increasing access to diverse ideas, supporting nonprofit university presses,... The Libraries offer access to e-books from university and other academic presses on the JSTOR platform. These include: These titles have been purchase and are owned as physical books are owned in perpetuity. These have the collection name "JSTOR Books." These have the series "JSTOR Ebooks: Open Access."

These titles are purchased automatically after a certain number of uses. High-use titles are purchased at the end of the fiscal year New York, NY -- October 4, 2023. JSTOR, part of the non-profit ITHAKA, announced today the release of the first books in Path to Open, a new program designed to affordably and sustainably support the open access publication of new groundbreaking... Launched as a pilot in January 2023, Path to Open is a delayed open access model where new books are made available to supporting libraries upon publication and become open access after three years. Thirty-seven university presses have joined the initiative along with over sixty academic libraries, including consortia like the Big Ten Academic Alliance who are looking to develop sustainable open access solutions.

"Presses and libraries are deeply aligned in our desire to nurture a bibliodiverse, robust scholarly publishing ecosystem that supports authors as well as the faculty and student researchers who benefit from access to their... "Path to Open is showing real promise as a new way to do this that is impactful and financially sustainable for everyone involved, including the many great smaller university presses." JSTOR recently released forty-three of the first 100 Path to Open titles. These books, all peer-reviewed, were selected by the participating university presses and JSTOR, and explore topics in thirty-six subjects like Public Health, Religion, Education, Communications, Literature, Conflict Resolution, and Film Studies. They strengthen bibliodiversity by focusing on research from diverse perspectives that use a range of methodologies and that may be international, national, or local in focus. Among the titles selected for Path to Open this year are books like:

JSTOR will be reporting on the usage of Path to Open books before and after becoming open access. The titles, accessible to Path to Open libraries today, are in high-use disciplines for JSTOR and are searchable alongside journals, other books, and primary sources. When the books become open access after three years, usage is expected to increase. In the past, books that have transitioned from licensed to open on JSTOR have experienced 5,500% increases. Publishers have been seeking a sustainable model to support open access ebook publishing that does not rely on authors finding funding and that can cover publishing costs. In 2022, a group of publishers, along with other partners in the community, contacted JSTOR to help build such a model.

We had a shared goal to find a model that addressed publishing costs and helped expand access to scholarly ebooks to a global audience. A driving question for me was, “How can we ensure that we can provide access to scholarly ebooks to individuals and students at colleges around the world where their library does not have the... For most librarians around the globe, access has been limited due to tight budgets, license restrictions, and a small number of scholarly ebooks being published as open access. Faculty want their students to engage with the latest scholarship, but library staff are forced to make difficult choices about which books to acquire and which to forgo. At the same time, publishers, especially smaller university presses, work to bring important research into the world while needing to balance the financial realities of producing scholarly monographs. This is the challenge that Path to Open, launched in 2023, set out to address.

And today, as the program grows to include more than 240 libraries and nearly 50 publishers, we can begin to see how a community-driven approach to open access is changing what’s possible for authors,... In my 25 years in this industry there have been many changes that have impacted library and publisher budgets, acquisition processes of print and ebooks, as well as access and discoverability for researchers. Today, our community faces increased pressure with shrinking library budgets, higher costs for publishing ebooks, the growing demand for scholarly ebooks to support trusted peer-reviewed sources for research, and finding sustainable solutions to provide... The models in the market today have significant limitations that prevent expanding global access to this scholarship. Traditional ebook licensing often limits simultaneous users and complicates course adoption. For presses, publishing ebooks as immediately open access can risk their financial sustainability, but the benefits of overcoming challenges to provide open access are real.

Open Access Books On Jstor Expanding Access To Research

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