Publication Guide
JSTOR is one of the most widely used resources in academic research - and one of the most widely misunderstood. It is not a journal, and it is not a publisher. JSTOR is a non-profit digital library, run by ITHAKA, that hosts, preserves, and provides access to scholarship from 1,850+ publishers: 2,800+ academic journals (over 12 million articles), 158,000+ scholarly books, 2 million+ images and primary sources, and 80,000+ open-access research reports from 187 policy institutes.
The project was conceived in 1994 by William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and launched as a service in 1995 to solve a concrete problem: libraries could not afford the shelf space to keep long runs of back issues. JSTOR digitized complete journal archives - in many cases back to volume 1, issue 1, including titles dating to the 1600s - and became the definitive archive for the humanities and social sciences. Since a 2009 merger it has been part of ITHAKA, a US non-profit. This guide explains what's in JSTOR, how to read it for free or cheaply, how its open-access programs work, and what JSTOR means for you as an author.
What's in JSTOR?
| Content type | Scale | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Journal archives | 2,800+ titles, 12M+ articles | Complete back runs; strongest in humanities and social sciences, with substantial science coverage |
| Scholarly books | 158K+ titles from 340+ publishers | Chapter-level PDFs; 13,000+ titles fully open access |
| Research reports | 80,000+ | Open access, from 187 think tanks and policy institutes |
| Primary sources & images | 2M+ items | Includes collections migrated from Artstor and thematic archives such as Struggles for Freedom |
Coverage is archival by design: for most subscription journals, JSTOR carries everything except the most recent volumes (see the moving wall below). Current issues usually live on the original publisher's own platform.
How access works (and what it costs)
JSTOR is free to search for everyone; what you can read depends on your access route.
| Route | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Institutional access | Covered by your library | Full access to whatever collections your institution licenses; 14,000+ institutions participate |
| Free personal account | $0 | Read up to 100 articles online every 30 days, plus all open content and Workspace research tools |
| JPASS | 199/year | Unlimited reading across 2,400+ journals in the JPASS collection, with 10 PDF downloads/month (120/year on the annual plan) |
| Open content | $0, no account needed for much of it | Open-access books, journals, research reports, and public-domain Early Journal Content |
If you are affiliated with a university, always start by logging in through your library - it is the broadest access you will get. Independent researchers should try the free account first and upgrade to JPASS only if the 100-article allowance runs out.
Open access on JSTOR
JSTOR is not an open-access publisher, but it runs several significant open programs:
- Path to Open - a community-funded Books at JSTOR initiative with roughly 50 university presses. Participating libraries fund early access to about 300 new monographs a year, and each title becomes fully open access 2-3 years after publication. The first 100 titles opened in January 2026, and the pilot became an ongoing program in April 2026, with 700+ titles across 60 disciplines so far.
- Open books and journals - 13,000+ open-access books plus a growing set of OA journals are free to everyone, no login required.
- Early Journal Content - roughly 500,000 public-domain articles from 200+ journals (published before 1923 in the US, before 1870 elsewhere), free since 2011.
- Research reports - 80,000+ policy and think-tank reports, all open access.
The moving wall: why the newest issues aren't there
For most archival journals, JSTOR and the publisher agree on a "moving wall" - a fixed delay, typically 3-5 years, between a journal's current volume and the latest volume available on JSTOR. If you need an article published last year, look for it on the publisher's own site (or the journal's SciSpace page) rather than JSTOR. The wall moves forward each year, so content is continuously added.
Citing JSTOR content
Cite the article, not the platform: author, title, journal, volume, issue, year, and pages, exactly as for any journal article. Every JSTOR item page provides a stable URL (or DOI) of the form jstor.org/stable/xxxxx - APA, MLA, and Chicago all accept this stable URL or DOI in the reference; never paste a session URL or proxy URL from your browser bar. JSTOR's built-in citation tool exports to BibTeX, RIS, and plain text, and SciSpace's citation generator supports 9,000+ styles if your target journal uses something unusual.
Can I publish or submit to JSTOR?
No - and this matters for authors. JSTOR has no submission system, no peer review, and no APCs, because it is an aggregator rather than a publisher of record. To "get into JSTOR", you publish in a journal or with a book publisher whose content JSTOR hosts; your work then appears on JSTOR under that publisher's agreement. Copyright, licensing, self-archiving rights, and any open-access fees are all governed by the original publisher's policies, not JSTOR's. If you are choosing where to submit, browse the venues below or the original publishers' SciSpace pages for scope, templates, and submission details.
