Roger C. Schonfeld - JSTOR: A History

ROGER C. SCHONFELD

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2003 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schonfeld, Roger C., 1977

JSTOR: a history/Roger C. Schonfeld.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-11531-1 (acid-free paper)

1. JSTOR (Computer file). 2. PeriodicalsDatabases. 3. JSTOR

(Organization)History. I. Title.

PN4836.S36 2003

050.285574dc21

2002035907

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Palatino by

Princeton Editorial Associates, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona

Printed on acid-free paper.

www.pupress.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

December 1993January 1994

FebruaryMay 1994

AprilAugust 1994

September 1994April 1995

FebruaryDecember 1995

September 1995August 1996

September 1995August 1996

JanuaryDecember 1996

September 1996December 1997

September 1996December 1997

May 1997December 1999

January 1998December 1999

July 1998December 1999

January 2000December 2001

A Self-Sustaining Organization

Lessons Learned

List of Journals

FIGURES

TABLES

MY FIRST encounter with JSTOR was at the University of Michigan back in 1993 or 1994 when Randy Frank showed me a demo of a very early version running on a Unix workstation.

Ive been a fan ever since.

JSTOR has come a long way from those humble beginnings. As of May 2002, there were 218 journals online, accounting for 62,170 issues, 1,504,372 articles, for a total of 9,169,564 pages. At that time, JSTOR had 1,321 participating libraries from over 60 countries.

JSTOR is one of those services that makes people say How did I ever live without it? Indeed, now academics all over the world use JSTOR virtually daily. During the six months of 2002, 16.29 million JSTOR journal pages were accessed online and 5.54 million articles were printed.

JSTOR has not only had a huge impact on scholarship at major research universities in the United States, but it also offers even greater benefits for relatively impoverished institutions in developed and developing nations. Literature that was totally inaccessible to these institutions in the past is now just a click of the mouse away. The result should be a richer educational experience for all concerned.

Roger Schonfeld has done us all a valuable service by recording the history of JSTOR now, while it is still fresh in the participants minds. His book is valuable not only as a historical account, but also as a compendium of lessons for those who intend to pursue similar ventures.

Academic publishing is evolving rapidly. JSTOR is one of several innovative efforts, including the HighWire Press at Stanford, Project Muse at Johns Hopkins, and the California Digital Library, to name just a few. We can expect to see many more projects in this area in the future. The history of pathbreaking efforts such as JSTOR will be hugely valuable to innovators in this area.

I draw two fundamental lessons from Rogers account for these innovators of tomorrow. First, be flexible. No matter how much planning you do, there will always be unforeseen contingencies. Be prepared to roll with the punches, and turn setbacks into opportunities.

Second, clone Bill Bowen. JSTOR was, ultimately, his vision. He not only conceived of it and funded the initial efforts, but he also went out and persuaded the core journals to come on board. With that prerequisite in place, Bill was able to persuade Kevin Guthrie to become CEO. Kevin, in turn, assembled the team that has led to JSTORs great success.

The critical ingredient in all of this was having someone with sufficient powers of persuasion to assemble a coalition to actually change the way things are done. This is not to be taken lightly. As Machiavelli put it, It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.

Of course, Machiavelli had it easy, living in pre-Renaissance Italy. If he had ever been president of a university, he would have been much more pessimistic about JSTORs chances of success!

Hal Varian
Berkeley 2002

FROM its earliest days, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has taken a keen interest in the health and well-being of academic and research libraries. They were seen by my predecessor, John Sawyer, as major contributors to scholarship and teaching, and Mr. Sawyer played a key role in the founding of RLG (Research Libraries Group) and in the marshalling of foundation support for libraries. One major concern, reflected in a monograph, University Libraries and Scholarly Communication, authored by Anthony M. Cummings et al. soon after my appointment as president of the foundation, was to ensure that increasing numbers of academic journals and rising subscription rates did not make it impossible for libraries to continue to collect, make accessible, and preserve core scholarly materials. As more and more library resources have become available in electronic formats, the foundations interest has evolved in these directions as a matter of course. The creation of JSTOR is an important milestone in this evolutionary process.

Within each of the foundations areas of programmatic interest, we have had a continuing commitment to report on our activities and to publish information on lessons we think we have learned from our work. For just this reason, we have intended for some time to present an account of our experiences with JSTOR. We had in mind tracing JSTORs history from its early days as a special project incubated within the Mellon Foundation and supported primarily through grants to its present-day status as an independent 501(c)(3) organization that is self-sustaining as a result of the revenues contributed by some 1,500 participating libraries worldwide. In the earliest days of the project, we promised to record both our achievements and our sometime frustrations. Our hope was then, and is today, that a careful, critical account of events along the way could help the scholarly community avoid at least some of our errors.

As time went on and JSTOR grew into an ever more complicated entity, it seemed impossible to capture its history in a short account, or even series of accounts, of the kind that I regularly incorporate into my annual reports. Instead, we asked Roger Schonfeld to prepare a detailed study documenting JSTORs experiences, warts and all. The foundation agreed to make all of its internal records available to him for this purpose, and Kevin Guthrie, president of JSTOR, also pledged his full cooperation.