JSTOR Online Access to Political Science Journal Archives

Since the launch of the Journal Storage Project (JSTOR) in 1995, APSA has played an active role in increasing access to political science scholarship. To further that goal APSA was an early parter with JSTOR to develop individual access opportunties. Today, APSA members may choose to subscribe to JSTOR and gain access to not only the entire collection of APSA journals on JSTOR, but those of three other organizations

APSA Subscribers to the individual access program may search or browse the following journals:

American Political Science Review (from 1903)
PS: Political Science & Politics (from 1968)
Perspectives on Politics (from 2003)
American Journal of Political Science (thanks to the cooperation of the Midwest Political Science Association)
American Journal of International Law (thanks to the cooperation of the American Society for International Law)
Political Science Quarterly (thanks to the cooperation of the Academy of Political Science)
Access to all five journals is provided at no additional charge beyond the normal low subscription rate of $25 a year.

More on JSTOR

JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization headquartered in New York City, was established to improve access to publications for the scholarly community using recent advances in information technology. The pilot phase of JSTOR, funded by a 1994 grant from the Mellon Foundation, gave students and faculty at seven test libraries access to the full archives of five economics and five history journals via the World Wide Web. By November 1997, JSTOR provided access to 32 journals in 12 disciplines and counted more than 200 college and university libraries among its participants.

Originally an initiative to solve library space and budget problems, JSTOR now strives to meet the needs of both scholars and libraries. Participating in JSTOR allows libraries to assemble and expand their collections and increase access to the journals while centralizing storage and delivery of those journals. JSTOR relieves the libraries of preservation and archiving duties while providing access to a number of journals unavailable in any other form. The database contains a thorough and accurate publication record for each journal included, giving the academic community access to full runs of important journal literature, within and across disciplines. The database is accessible 24 hours a day to students and faculty at participating institutions from any networked location, including offices and dorms; journals are never "out," and there are no missing pages or articles as there sometimes are in the stack copies of journals.

Since JSTOR focuses on preserving the archives of scholarly journals, current issues are not available in the database. Most scholarly journals appear on JSTOR three to five years after publication. Currently, JSTOR provides access to the 1906-2001, volumes of APSR and the full run of The Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, 1903-1914. A complete volume of the APSR journals is added every year with a three year "moving wall:" in 2005, the 2002 volume was made available; in 2006, the 2003 volume was made available and so on.

Using JSTOR

The JSTOR database contains three types of files: high-resolution images that provide a faithful replication of the original page; text files that facilitate full-text searching; and electronic table of contents files that provide the necessary organization for browsing and for accurate displaying of search results. JSTOR's search engine allows users to browse and search individual journals, or perform cross-disciplinary searches of multiple journals in multiple disciplines. Users can search the full text of materials or search by topic, author or key words. With JSTOR, research and literature that have been difficult to locate and retrieve are now easily accessible.

The image of the article appearing in JSTOR is a scanned image of the original journal. Scanning enables JSTOR to provide an exact replica of the original article both on screen and in print. Due to the scanning, it is not possible to cut and paste text from a JSTOR article. However, full articles can be printed from any desktop computer. Printing articles from JSTOR provides higher quality and more legible copies of the journals' pages than photocopying the original journal pages, many of which have yellowed over time. Since JSTOR uses high- resolution images to store and display replications of journal pages, it is not possible to print out articles simply by using the "Print" button in a web browser. Articles can be printed using one of three methods for printing from JSTOR:

High resolution copies of entire articles can be printed with a standard printer using JPRINT, the JSTOR print helper application. Users can download JPRINT and obtain step-by-step instructions for installation and configuration from the JSTOR web site.
Users can print portable document format (pdf) versions of JSTOR articles using Adobe Acrobat reader which can be freely downloaded from the Web (http://www.adobe.com/acrobat).  Users can retrieve PostScript versions of JSTOR articles, an option most useful for UNIX workstations or Linux PCs.

Sign up now!