January 6, 2010
Indiana University Press Joins Current Scholarship Program

Indiana University Press, founded in 1950 and one of the leading
university presses in the country, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and
research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, announced an
agreement today to make leading journals from the Press available worldwide
as part of the Current Scholarship Program, a new collaborative initiative
announced on August 13, 2009.
By joining the Program, current and historical content from 28 Indiana
University Press-published journals will be made available on a re-designed
JSTOR in 2011. This will offer faculty and students around the world access
to current issues alongside back issues easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s
nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the
Press’s journals, either individually or as part of current issue
collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single
transaction.
IU Press serials in the Program will include Africa Today, Jewish Social
Studies, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of
Folklore Research, and the Journal of Modern Literature, among others. The
journals will be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service
that is also part of ITHAKA.

According to Kathryn Caras, Director of Electronic and Serials Publishing
at IU Press, "The addition of current scholarship to the already-rich JSTOR
archive of content is the mother lode. Once the project launches in early
2011, researchers and scholars, through subscribing institutions, will have
access to the complete runs of some of the most important journals from
some of the finest university presses in the country. It will be an
invaluable research tool, and I'm very pleased IU Press Journals is part of
it."

Indiana University Press joins University of California Press and the
University of Illinois Press in the Program. The current issues of at least
70 journals from these publishers will be available from JSTOR for the 2011
subscription year. Other organizations are being encouraged to join.

“Indiana University Press publishes excellent journals that are
essential to research in the humanities,” said Mary Rose Muccie, JSTOR
Current Journals Director. “We look forward to working with the Press to
provide librarians and users with a great and efficient experience –
access to the latest Press-published research and full archives, on a
platform they know and use every day.”

Together, participants in this Program aim to create an improved online
work environment for faculty and students by bringing complete journal runs
from multiple publishers together in one place, to ease the burden on
librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of
publishers and independent titles, and to promote a more cost-effective
publishing environment for the scholarly community. For more information,
see http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp.