New services for academic, research, and cultural institutions to share, preserve, and manage digital collections – ITHAKA

“ITHAKA announced today a new set of services to help academic, research, and cultural institutions easily and affordably share, preserve, and manage their local digital collections. Using the same infrastructure that powers ITHAKA’s nonprofit services JSTOR and Portico, institutions can now increase the reach and usefulness of their local digital collections, secure access for generations to come, and further the mission they share with one another and ITHAKA to improve access to knowledge worldwide.

“Research and learning increasingly take place online, so institutions need solutions that align their local collections to digital workflows, are interoperable with a variety of tools, and are actively preserved as technology advances,” said Bruce Heterick, VP, Open Collections & Infrastructure at ITHAKA. “We created JSTOR and Portico to do exactly this for more than 100,000 journals and books held by libraries, and are excited to extend the use of this infrastructure to help institutions get their local digital collections more effectively into existing research and teaching workflows affordably, efficiently, and at scale.”

Following a successful series of pilots during which over 300 institutions shared more than 1,800 collections on JSTOR, and a cohort of 40 partners helped to define preservation and collection loading needs, ITHAKA developed three services to support institutions of all sizes looking for high-impact, sustainable solutions. …”

punctum books Releases 250 Open Access Titles on JSTOR – News – About JSTOR

“punctum books, an independent scholar- and queer-led open access publisher, and JSTOR recently released punctum’s entire backlist of 250 open access academic books on JSTOR. punctum books is dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry, publishing works that take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. They now have 360 open access books available on JSTOR. With these latest additions from punctum, JSTOR now includes over 10,000 open access books from 126 scholarly publishers….”

Path to Open: Exploring a Sustainable Model in Publishing New Open Access Books

“The quest for a sustainable model to support open access (OA) academic books continues, especially for literature in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. While there is a proliferation of initiatives, they tend to be publisher-specific or small scale. Achieving sustainability is challenging, particularly for small and medium university presses, but the demand and interest in the content is high. When publishers converted licensed ebooks to open access, they saw usage surge by 5,500% on JSTOR.

How can we meet the scholarly community’s shared goal of increasing equity and access to knowledge while ensuring value for funding libraries, reducing the financial risk for scholarly publishers, and expanding authors’ impact? In this webinar, you will learn how partners spanning the entire community collaborated to develop Path to Open, an innovative model for OA monograph publishing.

Representatives from two university presses, University of Tennessee library, The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), and the nonprofit JSTOR, will explore their new initiative to meet these challenges and address opportunities. You will learn how this program supports bibliodiversity in publishing, provides infrastructure and scale for the publishing and library community, and selects titles that will have high impact for its readers. You will also find out why libraries are participating in this pilot and the factors considered in the decision-making process. And you will hear how you, too, can join us on this promising path to open.”

Big Ten Academic Alliance and JSTOR Announce Multi-year Agreement for Path to Open Pilot – News – About JSTOR

“The research libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) have entered into a multi-year pilot agreement with JSTOR to support Path to Open, a new cost-effective, sustainable publishing model for supporting frontlist university press monographs and making them open access after three years.

More than 30 university presses and hundreds of authors are part of Path to Open. The initial 100 books will be released on JSTOR in the fall of 2023, with an additional 300 titles being published annually during the term of the pilot, 2024-2026. Path to Open participating libraries will have access to the titles during the first three years, and thereafter all titles will be converted to open access, benefiting readers worldwide. Path to Open books will be available DRM free with unlimited user access and integrated with other scholarly content on the JSTOR platform, including thousands of books, journals, and primary source collections….”

A new JSTOR fee model option to maximize access to knowledge: A letter from Kevin Guthrie – News – About JSTOR

“I recently shared the 2023 priorities ITHAKA has set to help provide the infrastructure the academic community needs to support research, teaching, and learning in an increasingly digital world. One of our most important aims is to provide universal access to as much content as possible. We are pursuing this through a range of initiatives, including Path to Open launched last month. I am excited to share another effort today: a new archive fee model that offers libraries another option to provide comprehensive access to all of our JSTOR Archival Journal and Primary Source collections.

Through this new model, the more than 5,000 institutions that have participated in our Expanded Access Program have an affordable way to continue the level of access they’ve had during the pandemic. It is also available to institutions that are not part of this program. We spent several years researching, testing, and refining this model in collaboration with libraries, consortia leaders, and publishers, and are grateful for their thoughtful guidance and encouragement. After hundreds of conversations and meetings, we have defined an approach that supports the broadest possible access to this material in a way that is sustainable for libraries, publishers, and JSTOR.

In brief, we have created a new single collection composed of all JSTOR Archival Journal and Primary Source collections and set an annual access fee (AAF) for this full collection for each institutional classification. Institutions who opt into this model will gain immediate access to the complete collection while starting at their current AAF level plus a modest adjustment of 2%-5% that continues to be applied annually until they reach the full fee. The annual fee adjustment percentage is based on the number of collections an institution currently licenses to recognize current investment. Institutions will eventually reach the same AAF for each classification, but the number of years to reach it will vary….”

JSTOR and university press partners announce Path to Open Books pilot – ITHAKA

“JSTOR, part of the non-profit ITHAKA, and a cohort of leading university presses announced today Path to Open, a program to support the open access publication of new groundbreaking scholarly books that will bring diverse perspectives and research to millions of people.

Launching as a pilot, Path to Open libraries will contribute funds to enable participating presses to publish new books that will transition from licensed to open access within three years of publication. The initial pilot will produce about one thousand open access monographs. If successful, it will lay the foundation for an entirely new way to fund long-form scholarship while vastly increasing its impact….”

JSTOR and University Press Partners Announce Path to Open Books Pilot | SSP Society for Scholarly Publishing

“JSTOR, part of the non-profit ITHAKA, and a cohort of leading university presses announced today Path to Open, a program to support the open access publication of new groundbreaking scholarly books that will bring diverse perspectives and research to millions of people.

Launching as a pilot, Path to Open libraries will contribute funds to enable participating presses to publish new books that will transition from licensed to open access within three years of publication. The initial pilot will produce about one thousand open access monographs. If successful, it will lay the foundation for an entirely new way to fund long-form scholarship while vastly increasing its impact….”

JSTOR and university press partners announce Path to Open Books pilot

JSTOR, part of the non-profit ITHAKA, and a cohort of leading university presses announced today Path to Open, a program to support the open access publication of new groundbreaking scholarly books that will bring diverse perspectives and research to millions of people.

 

ITHAKA and JSTOR in 2023A letter from Kevin Guthrie – ITHAKA

“In the coming months, we’ll be inviting broad community participation in a variety of initiatives to deliver on these aims.

We’re charting a path to open access for scholarly books in partnership with university presses and libraries to support publishing diverse voices and ideas
We’re fully integrating Artstor and JSTOR to deliver a high-quality, multi-content research and teaching experience
We’re launching hosting and preservation services to enable libraries to share their digital collections with millions of users around the world and to ensure their long-term sustainability
We’re taking steps to preserve emerging digital scholarship and collections of under-represented materials through experimentation and collaboration with publishers and archives
We’re rolling out an updated funding model to enable vastly increased access to the extensive journal archive and primary source collections the scholarly community has helped us to create
We’re gearing up for our next wave of growth for Constellate, our new teaching and learning platform for text analysis….”

Building JSTOR’s Offline Solution for Prison Education

“I am thrilled to share with you a new JSTOR Labs report, Supporting the Academic Research Needs of Incarcerated Students: Building JSTOR’s Offline Solution for Prison Education.  This report documents our work, beginning in 2018, to develop and pilot an improved, offline version of JSTOR for use in prisons and jails. …

Report Abstract

Incarcerated students often lack access to the resources and conditions, both physical and digital, that make self-directed research and research skill-building possible. Due to technical constraints – most notably the lack of internet access in most prison environments – few incarcerated students have access to research databases commonly used by students to discover scholarly content that is relevant to their coursework, research projects, and broader learning pursuits. Not only does lack of research experience have an impact on students’ ability to engage with academic work, but it also leaves students without the fundamental information and digital literacy skills that are increasingly essential for future work and continued learning. Since 2007, JSTOR, a digital library of scholarly resources, has been making strides to amend this gap in available scholarly resources and research tools by providing JSTOR access to incarcerated learners. This paper describes the work undertaken by JSTOR Labs, an experimental product development team at JSTOR, to develop an offline index of scholarly resources designed to serve the research needs of incarcerated students. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, this project yielded lessons regarding how to scale access to digital scholarly resources given the changing landscape of technology in prison, and continues to shape JSTOR’s work to help improve higher education in prison and reduce barriers for student research.”

Say Hello to Anno : Hypothesis | 18 Aug 2022

“It’s been 11 years since we launched Hypothesis. It’s gone by so fast. During this time, we’ve accomplished many things: We defined a vision for open web annotation, we built an open source framework to implement it, we helped form and lead the working group that shipped the W3C standard, and we launched a service that’s now used by over a million people around the world who have made nearly 40 million annotations. In higher education, more than 1,200 colleges and universities use Hypothesis. And we’ve grown from a handful of people into a team of more than 35 passionate web builders. We’re not stopping here.

We’ve always had our sights set on the bigger idea: that this still-nascent effort can blossom into a true network of interoperable services — a rich ecosystem of collaboration, conversation and community over all knowledge. We believe that when incentives are aligned toward quality and away from monetizing attention, we can produce something of profound social importance. A utility layer for humanity. Since launch, the Hypothesis Project has been incorporated as a nonprofit. And while our nonprofit was an excellent home for our mission, it also limited us to grants and donations. Though we were beginning to provide services that we could charge for, we still needed capital to expand. Frustratingly, while our needs were growing, several of the key funding sources we’d relied on were no longer available to us as they shuttered programs or changed strategies. In 2019, we and others formed Invest In Open Infrastructure (IOI), an “initiative to dramatically increase the amount of funding available to open scholarly infrastructure.” We recruited Kaitlin Thaney to that effort, and she has been doing a terrific job laying the foundation for this. But all this would take time we didn’t have.

In response, and to better position us to achieve our long-held mission, we’ve formed Anno, a public benefit corporation (aka “Annotation Unlimited, PBC”) that shares the Hypothesis mission as well as its team. We’ve done this so that we can take investment in a mission aligned way and scale the Hypothesis service to meet the opportunity in front of us. Anno is funded by a $14M seed round that includes a $2.5M investment from ITHAKA, the nonprofit provider of JSTOR, a digital library that serves more than 13,000 education institutions around the world, providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Also participating in the round are At.inc, Triage Ventures, Esther Dyson, Mark Pincus and others. ITHAKA’s president, Kevin Guthrie, has joined Anno’s board as an observer….”

ITHAKA invests in open-annotation leader Hypothesis – ITHAKA

“ITHAKA is investing in the leading open annotation service Hypothesis. Hypothesis—developed with funding from the Sloan, Mellon and other foundations—allows users to make private, semi-private, or public annotations on any webpage, PDF, or document. This $2.5 million investment—made to Anno, the public-benefit corporation that is home to Hypothesis—furthers ITHAKA’s mission to expand access to knowledge and education by supporting a key component of open higher education infrastructure: interoperable teaching and learning tools that positively impact student learning outcomes.

Hypothesis is available as a free browser extension as well as a fee-based enterprise service that integrates annotation functionality directly into college and university learning management systems. It has a million users globally and more than 200 institutional customers. Faculty and students are using Hypothesis in the classroom to annotate course material, generating asynchronous discussion around specific texts. This relatively simple activity of coming together virtually around an assigned reading, known as social annotation, is making an impact. At Wake Forest University, Hypothesis is now being used by over 60% of all students across all disciplines. Recent case studies, like this one analyzing social annotation in three undergraduate courses at a Canadian university, are also showing evidence of its potential….”

ITHAKA invests in open annotation leader HypothesisA letter from Kevin Guthrie – News – About JSTOR

“I am excited to share today that we have invested $2.5 million in Anno, the public-benefit corporation that is home to Hypothesis.

As you may know, Hypothesis is a tool that enables people to annotate documents and webpages. Its free browser extension is in use by a million people globally, with a version that integrates with learning management systems now installed at 200 colleges and universities. We see tremendous potential for tools like Hypothesis that are open and interoperable to improve teaching and learning.

In addition to the investment, we are working on a pilot project with Anno to enable the use of Hypothesis with the text-based materials on JSTOR through learning management systems. As an organization with a mission to expand access to knowledge and education, ITHAKA’s investment and this collaboration will support the use and study of the materials you and we have worked so hard to produce, preserve and make accessible. I encourage you to read our public announcement as well as Anno’s blog post for more details….”

ITHAKA invests in open annotation leader HypothesisA letter from Kevin Guthrie – News – About JSTOR

“I am excited to share today that we have invested $2.5 million in Anno, the public-benefit corporation that is home to Hypothesis.

As you may know, Hypothesis is a tool that enables people to annotate documents and webpages. Its free browser extension is in use by a million people globally, with a version that integrates with learning management systems now installed at 200 colleges and universities. We see tremendous potential for tools like Hypothesis that are open and interoperable to improve teaching and learning.

In addition to the investment, we are working on a pilot project with Anno to enable the use of Hypothesis with the text-based materials on JSTOR through learning management systems. As an organization with a mission to expand access to knowledge and education, ITHAKA’s investment and this collaboration will support the use and study of the materials you and we have worked so hard to produce, preserve and make accessible. I encourage you to read our public announcement as well as Anno’s blog post for more details….”

Growth of open content in 2021 – About JSTOR

“By combining rapidly expanding open and free primary sources with our continuously growing journal archives, we strengthen the depth of your patrons’ research and enhance the value of your investment in JSTOR.

We introduced new functionality and more diverse types of open content from publishers, libraries, archives, and museums, including more open images from Artstor and open primary source collections. These resources are complemented with essential Open Access scholarship and address the increased needs for remote teaching and learning….”