Preferred Citation: Ekman, Richard, and Richard E. Quandt, editors Technology and Scholarly Communication. Berkeley, Calif Pittsburgh?]:  University of California Press Published in association with the Andrew K. Mellon Foundation,  c1999 1999. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5w10074r/


 
Chapter 11— Analysis of JSTOR The Impact on Scholarly Practice of Access to On-line Journal Archives

Implications for the JSTOR Experiment

Although extremely preliminary, these early data suggest trends that merit further exploration as JSTOR expands. First, it is encouraging to discover that among faculty who have used JSTOR, rates of use are already comparable to rates for use of on-line searching-a technology that predates JSTOR by two decades. It will be interesting to see if JSTOR use grows beyond this modest level to equal the use of key Internet applications, like e-mail and Web browsing. Second, there appear to be clear differences in journal use across disciplinary lines. For example, economists focus attention on a smaller set of journals than is the case in history. Therefore, it may be easier to satisfy demand for on-line access to back archives in fields that have one or two flagship journals than in more diverse fields where scholarly attention is divided among dozens of journals. This conclusion may lead commercial providers of back archive content to ignore more diverse disciplines at the expense of easier-to-service, focused disciplines. Finally, the negative correlation between the number of journal subscriptions and JSTOR use suggests the possibility of a substitution effect (i.e., JSTOR for paper). However, the significance of this correlation is difficult to determine, since there is no way to know the direction of causality in a cross-sectional study.

Preparation of this article was supported by a grant to the University of Michigan from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. JSTOR is the proprietary product of JSTOR, a nonprofit


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corporation dedicated to provision of digital access to the back archives of scholarly journals. For more information, please consult www.jstor.org.

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Kristin Garlock, Marcia Heringa, Christina Maresca, William Mott, Sherry Piontek, Tony Ratanaproeksa, Blake Sloan, and Melissa Stucki in gathering the data for this study. Also, we thank Ann Bishop, Joan Durrance, Kristin Garlock, Kevin Guthrie, Wendy Lougee, Sherry Piontek, Sarah Sully, and the participants of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholarly Communication and Technology Conference for comments on earlier drafts. Finally, we thank the history and economics faculty of Bryn Mawr College, Denison University, Haverford College, Swarthmore College, the University of Michigan, and Williams College for their patience and cooperation as participants in this research.

Requests for copies should be sent to: (1) Thomas Finholt, Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work, C-2420 701 Tappan Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1234; or (2) finholt@umich.edu.


Chapter 11— Analysis of JSTOR The Impact on Scholarly Practice of Access to On-line Journal Archives
 

Preferred Citation: Ekman, Richard, and Richard E. Quandt, editors Technology and Scholarly Communication. Berkeley, Calif Pittsburgh?]:  University of California Press Published in association with the Andrew K. Mellon Foundation,  c1999 1999. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5w10074r/