JSTOR/Ithaka Merger

[Heidi McGregor <hm@jstor.org>]

New York, NY
January 25, 2009

JSTOR and Ithaka Merge, Uniting Efforts to Serve the Scholarly Community

JSTOR and Ithaka today announced the merger of their organizations. This
move unites two pioneering entities that are focused on helping the
scholarly community take advantage of rapidly advancing information
technologies.

JSTOR was founded in 1995 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a shared
digital library to help academic institutions save costs associated with
the storage of library materials and to vastly improve access to
scholarship. Today, more than 5,200 academic institutions and 600
scholarly publishers and content owners participate in JSTOR. Ithaka was
started in 2003 by Kevin Guthrie, the original founder of JSTOR, with
funding from the Mellon Foundation as well as The William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation and Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation.  Ithaka was
established to aid promising not-for-profit digital initiatives and to
provide research and insight on important strategic issues facing the
academic community.  Ithaka has become known for its influential reports
including the 2007 University Publishing in A Digital Age and the 2008
Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources. It is the
organizational home to Portico, a digital preservation service, and NITLE,
a suite of services supporting the use of technology in liberal arts
education.

The new combined enterprise will be called Ithaka and will be dedicated to
helping the academic community use digital technologies to advance
scholarship and teaching and to reducing system-wide costs through
collective action.

This is a natural step for these organizations. JSTOR and Ithaka already
work closely together, sharing a common history, values, and fundamental
purpose. During 2008, the Ithaka-incubated resource Aluka was integrated
into JSTOR as an initial step, further strengthening ties between the
organizations. JSTOR will now join Portico and NITLE as a coordinated set
of offerings made available under the Ithaka organizational name.

As one organization, Ithaka will explore how to use its combined knowledge
and experience to help its constituents in new ways. "The academic
community has invested significantly in the important set of services that
we manage and, together, they represent core elements of the networked
digital infrastructure needed to support scholarship, research, and
teaching. Increasingly we are approached for help on a range of
initiatives that seek to leverage this investment and that we think will
benefit from stronger coordination across all our areas of expertise and
activity," said Guthrie. "We are very excited about the potential to work
with our constituents in even more useful innovative ways through this
combination."

The organization will also remain steadfastly committed to enabling
institutions to maximize the benefits they provide to scholars and
students while containing expenses. Michael Spinella, Executive Director
of JSTOR and now Executive Vice President of Ithaka added, "JSTOR and
Ithaka have a history of helping academic institutions by building and
managing collectively-supported large-scale resources with an aim of
developing sustainable models that deliver greater value than institutions
could achieve alone.  Now is the time when we can work even more closely
together to develop and sustain the kinds of shared solutions that will be
vital to the success of educational institutions in the future."
In addition to JSTOR, Portico, and NITLE, Ithaka's existing research and
strategic services groups will remain important parts of the enterprise.
The board will be composed of Ithaka and JSTOR Trustees, with Henry
Bienen, President of Northwestern University, serving as Chairman and Paul
Brest, President of the Hewlett Foundation as Vice Chairman.