JSTOR and University of California Press Announce Current Scholarship Program

["Marita LaMonica" <Marita.LaMonica@jstor.org>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MEDIA CONTACTS

JSTOR
Heidi McGregor
VP, Marketing & Communications

ITHAKA

heidi.mcgregor@ithaka.org
212-358-6406

University of California Press:

Rebekah Darksmith
Sales & Marketing Director
rebekah.darksmith@ucpress.edu
510-643-0952

A new collaboration emerges to improve access to scholarship for 
faculty, students, and librarians. University of California Press 
and JSTOR today announced a new effort to invest in a shared 
online platform and outreach services that promise to create a 
more seamless, rich online work environment for faculty and 
students, ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate 
license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent 
titles, and promote a more cost-effective publishing environment.

August 12, 2009 - Berkeley, CA and New York, NY - University of 
California Press, the not-for-profit publishing arm of the 
University of California, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and 
research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, will 
work in partnership - and encourage others to join them - to make 
current and historical scholarly content available on a single, 
integrated platform, to provide a single point of purchase and 
access for librarians and end users around the world, and to 
ensure its long-term preservation.

Beginning in 2011, current content from all University of 
California Press published journals, including those from 
scholarly societies, will be hosted on a re-designed JSTOR 
platform.  Faculty and students around the world will be able to 
access all licensed content on JSTOR - current issues, back 
issues, and a growing set of primary source materials from 
libraries - easily and seamlessly. JSTOR's nearly 6,000 library 
participants worldwide will be able to license the Press's 
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 is 
also part of ITHAKA.

"We hear from many publishers about the challenges they face in 
managing technology and achieving the scale needed to build 
visibility and a widespread subscription base for their 
journals." said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director, "At 
the same time libraries and users often find it difficult to 
license and use high-quality publications scattered among 
hundreds of different publishers and sites. This new effort is 
aimed at providing users seamless access to a wide range of 
current and historical content, while enabling libraries to 
support their access in more cost-effective ways."

"This should really help publishers, libraries, and the 
community," added Rebecca Simon, Associate Director of University 
of California Press and Director of the Journals + Digital 
Publishing Division. "UC Press and our society clients will host 
our publications on a platform where we benefit from rich 
functionality and wider exposure to libraries than we have today, 
where JSTOR's millions of users will be able to access the full 
breadth of our content in a place they visit regularly, and where 
libraries will be able to add our publications to their holdings 
with the ease of a single license agreement and invoice from 
JSTOR, while also being assured of their preservation over time."

The Current Scholarship Program - as the effort will be known - 
grew out of a long-standing relationship and dialogue between UC 
Press and JSTOR who share an understanding of the problems facing 
scholarly communications and a deep desire to work together to 
craft a sustainable publishing model that embodies academic 
values.  The effort was also informed by research conducted by 
Ithaka S+R, the strategy and research arm of ITHAKA, over the 
past several years and the group's ongoing work to understand and 
develop sustainable business models and support innovation in the 
development and dissemination of digital scholarship.

Driving the partnership is an articulated set of principles, 
among them: supporting the broad dissemination of quality 
scholarship through affordable and sustainable means, promoting 
fair and transparent pricing, facilitating seamless access to 
authoritative content of all kinds, and ensuring reliable, 
long-term preservation and access to scholarship. Organizations 
interested in joining the Program in the future - whether 
commercial or non-commercial - will be encouraged to embrace 
these fundamentals as well.

"Now is the time for new approaches that will enable the academic 
community to thrive in the future and to do so in ways and with 
organizations that understand and support scholarly values," said 
Lynne Withey, Director of University of California Press. "The 
Press's purposes and interests are well aligned with our 
colleagues at ITHAKA and with those of other scholarly 
organizations and universities and colleges around the world. We 
know what we are after, and we are eager to have a greater, 
lasting impact by working together in ways that neither 
organization, nor our colleagues in other organizations and 
institutions, could alone."

In addition to easing access to scholarly content, the redesigned 
JSTOR platform will also offer enhanced functionality to support 
the publication of new digital scholarship.  Working with Atypon 
Systems, whose Literatum technology is underlying both JSTOR and 
UC Press's current platforms, the new platform will provide for 
the delivery of multimedia content, increased personalization 
features, and new navigation and visualization features.  This 
development will help authors and their publishers take better 
advantage of technology in the creation, explication, and impact 
of their work.

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

--END--

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 1,000 academic 
journals, as well as conference proceedings, monographs, and 
other scholarly content. Nearly 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 <http://www.jstor.org/>
www.ithaka.org <http://www.ithaka.org/>

University of California Press

Founded in 1893, University of California Press is one of the 
largest and most distinguished of American university presses, 
publishing books and journals in the humanities, social sciences, 
and natural sciences. The Press publishes nearly 200 new books 
and 40 journals each year, representing a broad spectrum of 
acclaimed works from innovative first works by young academics to 
in-depth articles presenting the results of the research and 
creative thinking of many of the world's foremost scholars. A 
major publisher of scholarly journals, the Journals + Digital 
Publishing Division has extensive experience providing 
traditional and digital publishing services for more than 20 
client scholarly societies and associations.

www.ucpressjournals.com www.ucpress.edu