University of Chicago Press Joins Current Scholarship Program

The University of Chicago Press and JSTOR announced today that they will join forces in the Current Scholarship Program. Scheduled to launch early next year, the program will bring scholarly content from leading not-for-profit publishers to a single integrated platform, making its use more innovative, efficient, and affordable for faculty, students, librarians and publishers.

The University of Chicago Press, one of the world’s oldest and largest university presses, brings 51 renowned titles to the program, including many of the most influential publications in the world such as The American Historical Review, The American Naturalist, the American Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Political Economy. Both current and back issues will be accessible on the platform.

First announced last August, the Current Scholarship Program addresses some of the biggest challenges and inefficiencies in scholarly communications today. For scholars and educators, the program offers an improved online work environment that combines new content with complete journal backfiles. For librarians, the collaboration brings leading journals from multiple publishers together under one roof, allowing direct licensing through JSTOR.

“While there have been great advances in ease of use and access to scholarly content in the last decade, researchers and librarians are now faced with a multitude of online platforms and interfaces. Navigating among these silos of content and identifying the authoritative material requires climbing not one, but many, learning curves. It is still not as efficient as it should be,” said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director. “Meanwhile, scholarly publishers are challenged with managing fast-paced changes in technology and reaching new audiences. We know we can address some of these issues by working collaboratively and with a shared sense of purpose.”

There are now eleven publishers working together as part of the program, and that number is rapidly increasing. With the addition of Chicago, the current issues for at least 150 journals will be available on JSTOR by 2011. This content will be seamlessly integrated with and accessible alongside the more than 1,100 journals with back issues on JSTOR today as well as a growing set of primary source materials from libraries and museums.

More than 6,000 JSTOR library participants worldwide will be able to license the current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. The journals will also continue to be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that, along with JSTOR, is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA.

“The University of Chicago Press and JSTOR share a significant mission: to disseminate scholarship of the highest standard”, said Garrett Kiely, Director of the University of Chicago Press. “The Current Scholarship Program is the next step in our long-standing relationship and brings both organizations closer to realizing our goals of improved access to many of the world’s most important publications. We at Chicago are very excited to be a part of this and will work closely with JSTOR to continuously improve our offerings to the world’s libraries.”

The relationship between JSTOR and the University of Chicago Press dates back to 1996 when the Press became one of the first publishers to store journal backfiles in the JSTOR digital archive.

“Years ago we worked with The University of Chicago Press to make the nascent idea of a large-scale archive of digitized historical journals supported by the scholarly community a reality,” commented Spinella. “It is tremendously exciting to be working together again toward a vision that we hope will have similar impact and benefit for the academic community.”

For more information about the Current Scholarship Program, see http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp

JSTOR
JSTOR is a preservation archive and research platform for the academic community. Through JSTOR, faculty, researchers, and students are able to discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over 1,100 academic journals, as well as conference proceedings, monographs, and other scholarly content. More than 6,000 libraries and cultural heritage institutions and hundreds of the world's leading publishers of scholarly literature participate in and support JSTOR. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to advance scholarship and teaching in sustainable ways. ITHAKA also includes two additional services – Ithaka S+R and Portico.

www.jstor.org

www.ithaka.org

The University of Chicago Press
Founded in 1891, the University of Chicago Press is the largest American university press. The Journals Division publishes over 50 periodicals and serials in a wide range of disciplines, including several journals that were the first scholarly publications in their respective fields. Online since 1995, the Journals Division has been a pioneer in electronic publishing, delivering original, peer-reviewed research from international scholars to a worldwide audience.

www.journals.uchicago.edu