Free stuff from JSTOR

My kiddos are true JSTOR junkies.  They rely on the scholarly database for their research in many areas, but particularly in history and lit crit.

Alas, not every high school can squeeze this subscription into their budgets.  But cheer up, young historians and scholars . . .

Earlier this week, JSTOR announced that they are making their early journal content (stuff published prior to 1923 in the US and prior to 1870 everywhere else) available free.   This content–500,000 articles from more than 220 journals–will be released on a rolling basis.  Full functionality. No registration required.

Early Journal Content includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences.  It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR.

While JSTOR currently provides access to scholarly content to people through a growing network of more than 7,000 institutions in 153 countries, we also know there are independent scholars and other people that we are still not reaching in this way.  Making the Early Journal Content freely available is a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options to the content on JSTOR for these individuals.

Available full-text content for non-subscribers is labeled with a little grey free button in the JSTOR result list interface. (You may suggest that students re-sort their results from oldest to newest.) My little test led me to believe that the free content is also accessible through a Google Scholar search.

For more information, check out the brief program description, video tutorial, Terms & Conditions of Use, and Frequently Asked Questions.

You can follow JSTOR content release alerts via Twitter or Facebook.

Filed under: databases, research, search tools