By Jeff Dickens
The last year of JSTOR’s Journal Hosting Program
JSTOR has posted an announcement of the discontinuation of hosting current journals on their platform which has resulted in questions about access to these journals. You can read their post here: “Program offering current journal issues to end after 2021.” The purpose of this post is to clarify exactly what this message means for Moravian College.
There will be no cancellation of subscribed electronic journal titles currently hosted on the JSTOR platform. The change affects our current subscriptions to 36 titles from Indiana University Press, 36 titles from University of Illinois Press, and 75 titles from Pennsylvania University Press (see below). These titles will no longer be accessed through the JSTOR interface as the JSTOR Journal Hosting Program is ending after December 31, 2021, but you will see these titles hosted on a different interface. Reeves Library will announce the switch over, and the new interface, as soon as information is available from the publishers.
In the meantime, nothing changes at least until the end of the year. Furthermore, the other JSTOR collections from Reeves Library are not affected – four “Arts & Sciences” Collections (I, II, II, and VII), plus the “Music Legacy Collection” and the “Life Sciences Collection,” a total of about 880 titles. These JSTOR journal collections are completely separate subscription from the JSTOR Journal Hosting Program that is ending at the close of 2021.
Just as a note to remember that the original purpose of JSTOR was to assist academic libraries with the burden of “Journal STORage” of the volumes that accumulate over the course of a subscription. Libraries keep 3-5 years of the most current issues, which are not available on JSTOR by implementation of a “moving wall” of accessible content, all in agreement with publishers. The JSTOR Journal Hosting Program was an effort to move to an actual hosting platform for currently subscribed content.
For reference, here are the affected titles.