I’ve written some posts in the past about vendors that have done some pretty slimy things in the name of making a profit. At least that makes sense to me. That’s their model — they’re profit-driven. Then there’s JSTOR. JSTOR is not an EBSCO or an Elsevier. JSTOR is a non-profit. JSTOR is a “service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content.” While JSTOR has always been a bear to search, I have never thought of JSTOR as a company that would make decisions that were bad for users in the name of making money. But this new development has me scratching my head.
I’m sure anyone working in an academic library has already heard that the JSTOR interface was changing this summer. Well, how nice that they wait to finally make the change live the week that students are coming back to most schools. One of our librarians attended a webinar on the new interface and reported about it to the rest of the staff so we were pretty prepared for what was coming in terms of the interface change. But the thing that’s a really big deal is that JSTOR is now going to display everything in their collection by default. That probably doesn’t matter to a large University that subscribes to every JSTOR collection known to man, but for libraries of small to medium size that only subscribe to maybe 4 or fewer collections, your students will suddenly be seeing a lot of results in JSTOR that they can’t access. I did a search on World War II and Poland and out of the first 10 results there were only 2 that were in the JSTOR collections we subscribe to. If a student clicked on one of the eight of ten results that did not have a green check mark to the right of it they would see this:
What’s interesting is that we actually have many of these articles available in full-text through other databases.
I know what you’re probably thinking — “every database displays things that aren’t available in full-text. You can just enable your link resolver and students will be able to link to the full-text.” That would be nice, but JSTOR has decided not to make that possible. The response we got from tech support was “OpenURL links are not currently available when your users arrive at articles in collections that you do not license.” So, we can link out from full-text articles in JSTOR to versions of the same full-text in other collections, but we can’t link out from articles we do not have the full-text of in JSTOR to full-text in other collections. Either a lot of smart people don’t understand the purpose of OpenURL or they really don’t want to make it easy for students to figure out that their library has access to these resources through another database.
The other response we got was this: “At this time it is also not possible to change the default search to just your licensed collections.” Students can check a box on the Advanced Search page only that will “Include only content I can access”, but how many students are going to 1) notice that check box and 2) know what it really means? Especially when the default option (the box already checked) says “Include links to external content” and the explanation next to it says “JSTOR displays citation information and an outside link to the full-text of some recently published articles on external sites.” It makes it sound like students can get more full-text content that way when the reality is that they’ll just get more results that ask them to pay $12 or $30 for the article.
The tech support person went on to state “I will make sure that your suggestion of setting default search limits, and expanding OpenURL links to cover all non-licensed content, is passed on to our development team for consideration.” I have to call BS here. I can’t believe that these were not conscious decisions on their part. Was this developed by one lone dude in a shack with no input from other designers and librarians? I have to believe that they can’t be surprised that libraries would want these features.
I refuse to believe that all of the smart people at JSTOR have no idea how OpenURL works and have no idea how pretty much every other database vendor in the known world operates these days. Even if they were clueless, JSTOR has advisory boards made up of librarians who could tell them how things work. So my first thought was clearly they want to confuse students into paying for access to articles they could get through another database or ILL. But then I remember that this is JSTOR. They’re a not-for-profit. Something is clearly going on behind the scenes that we’re missing the boat on. And the first thing that pops into my head is PUBLISHERS. Are the pressures of publishers pulling out of JSTOR to pursue lucrative deals with EBSCO become to much? Did you have to make concessions that benefit your publishing partners but hurt the end user? I do understand that this change will make it easier for people not affiliated with a library to search JSTOR (helping to increase their base of individuals purchasing articles), but there is no reason that they couldn’t at the same time give libraries the ability to customize the default at their institutions or to make OpenURL work across the board.
So which one is it, JSTOR? Are you really that clueless about how modern databases and OpenURL link resolvers work? Are you out to make a buck off confused Freshmen with credit cards? Or did your publishing partners force you into it? Either way, you’re putting the customer dead last in this equation and, IMHO, breaking a trust relationship you’ve had with librarians for many years. I know that my solution to this will be simple. I just won’t teach JSTOR to social science majors here and will encourage students to use WorldCat Local. JSTOR articles are indexed in WC Local, so students can find the articles there and use Serials Solutions 360 Linker to link out to whichever database holds the full-text. Problem solved. And I doubt I’ll be the only librarian looking for a way around teaching JSTOR in information literacy classes if JSTOR doesn’t make a change ASAP. Way to make yourself less visible to future scholars, JSTOR!
I’ll be really curious to see how this shakes out, because I can’t imagine we’re the only library that’s going to be very negatively impacted by JSTOR’s bad decisions. I hope they make a change, and soon, because my History and Political Science info lit classes are coming in just a couple of weeks.
Update: For those who think that this is already resolved or have mentioned that you’re seeing a link resolver link to some articles, let me explain what you’re looking at as I’ve done a bit more digging. There are three types of results you can get right now in JSTOR, and you’ll see each in this screenshot (sorry for the size, my computer is being wonky — just click on it to expand it):
The first (with the gray asterisk) is from a journal that is not in a JSTOR collection we subscribe to. There will be no link resolver link that lets patrons easily get to the article in another database to to our library’s ILL form. Frequently, there will be something that tells the user they need to pay to access the article. Otherwise, it’ll just be a dead end.
The second (with the green check mark) is an article that is in our JSTOR collection. Students can click on the title and get to the full-text.
The third (with the yellow arrow) is from a journal this is in our JSTOR collection, but it is not from the date range of full-text that is available through JSTOR (in this case, the article is from 2006 and JSTOR’s coverage goes to 2005). Clicking on the title of this type of result will provide a link resolver link so that the patron can check to see if the library has this in full-text elsewhere.
For those who are seeing link resolver links right now, what you are seeing is the third type of link. You may just have too many JSTOR collections to easily get a result in the second category which is very lucky for you.
Disclaimer…I’m the colleague that attended the webinar and honestly, I remember thinking: “are they really doing what I think they’re doing” (in reference to making all collections searchable). Though I kept it the back of my head, I really just figured they would allow us to turn on our link resolver of choice. There’s simply no way it’s a coincidence that it’s REALLY easy to see where you can purchase an article, but not so easy to find it available elsewhere through your library or make a request via interlibrary loan. This is never something I would’ve expected out of JSTOR…ever.
Pingback: » New JSTOR Database to Show Results to Content We Can’t Access Reference at Newman Library
I literally saw the change happen: one article search came up under old interface, next search under new interface.
I’m very thankful I can access full JSTOR–I’d be pretty ticked if my searches came up with pages of articles I couldn’t access. Knowledge shouldn’t be so expensive…
What a great, informative article!! Thank you for sharing this with all of us. I’m shocked that JSTOR made things the way they are and really can’t see why they did it. Your substitute method seems sound and I’m sure it will work quite well, but I always enjoyed using JSTOR in the past and feel that it is (was) a great database. Hopefully they will change this soon!
I don’t know much about this whole JSTOR thing, but we need to remember when dealing with “non-profit” vendors, that “non-profit” is a tax status and not a business model or a philosophy.
I can see that we have a new JSTOR interface but I’m not seeing the same changes as your posted image.
Here’s what we see where there is a link to our e-journal list (Serial Solutions) and I don’t see an option to buy it. Am I missing something?
http://screencast.com/t/ZTI3MThkOTI
In another note on their cluelessness, I needed an article the other day and when I got the splash page for the article JSOTR had a prominent note to the effect of “You must use Internet Explorer to print.”
Um, that’s kind if hard on a Mac and I’m guessing on a Linux box too. Nonetheless, I was able to print my article but I still find the message itself insulting and clueless.
By the way, I too have loved JSTOR in the past. I sure hope they fix these issues soon.
We had the same issue when EngNetBase et al became CRCNetBase. They flailed around and finally fixed it, but they never seemed to consider that searches – whether on the site or coming through Z39.50 – should default to subscribed items.
Helpful to know, as I’m doing some research through JSTOR right now. Seems like there’s a pretty easy fix though – go to Advanced Search and check the box ‘ Include only content I can access’.
Unfortunately, most students will probably complain rather than go through that extra step.
and no way to limit to fulltext only?
Wow, thanks for this! We just started a subscription to JSTOR and are preparing to present it to our faculty – good to know where the problems lie!
Ovid does the same thing with their nursing collection. They default the search to search all of the journals and its hard for you to search just your collection.
It’s another way for them to try to get unsuspecting undergraduates to “buy the article” that they really want and that their research can’t do without!
Hi, Meredith. We’ve been listening and receiving feedback about the platform update. These issues are always more complicated than they might appear. I can tell you for certain that our motivation is not to deceive students, nor to try to increase revenue. We do feel, and we have been told by many users, that there’s value in broad content discovery beyond what’s immediately available to them in JSTOR, and that is what is at the heart of this change. So, in other words, users want to know if an article exists even if they don’t have access to it. This presents a conundrum for us in that we don’t want libraries to feel pressured to purchase but we also want users to know that articles do exist. We hear you all – we may have launched this new feature before we had all of the necessary infrastructure in place to balance the interests of everyone – libraries, users and publishers. We are evaluating next steps and will make a decision ASAP. This is all very valuable feedback and we will continue to work with the community to get this tuned in the right way. –Kristen, JSTOR
Thanks for this posting Meredith. JSTOR is very important for our campus and is one of our top 5 sources of full text, especially in Social Sciences and Humanities. Please JSTOR make an option for libraries to set the default to either our campus’ content or all collections. Denise Green at Millikin in IL
Kristen,
I don’t understand why you say it’s ‘more complicated than they might appear’.
Couldn’t JSTOR simply do a flip of what was pointed out in comment #8 by Andrew? Just default to only showing the content the students can access.
Then, if students want to see articles that exist “even if they don’t have access to it” they can go to Advanced Search and check a box ‘ Include content I cannot access’.
As there’s a toggle box in advanced search for this, seems pretty straightforward to implement the reverse of the current settings. Which makes sense as most students probably don’t want to see content they can’t get at, and want to focus on that which they can.
Solved your issue; my invoice is in the post 😉
Yeah, this is a problem. We have almost everything in JSTOR, yet I was prompted, in result 16 in the search I did, to buy an article from Cambridge Online (through the “link to External Article”) even though we have that article through another database.
I know Google Scholar does this–links to the vendor–and we can try to warn students not to buy stuff from them. At least Google Scholar does let us embed our link resolver.
It really seems JSTOR should be doing the same. This is going to be very confusing to our students.
One of the things I enjoyed showing our students was the journals included in our subscribed disciplines. Now I can’t do that with all the disciplines showing. These changes are going to make this database very frustrating for undergrads. They will use it once, ask us why they can’t get the articles in a certain discipline, and then never use it again. Being able to limit to full-text is a requirement for undergrads. I also know that not linking through a journal linker, such as Serials Solutions, and instead going to a page asking for payment is not going to set well with our library administrator. He has been fond of JSTOR, but this is something he does not tolerate in databases. It has to be a feature that can be turned off.
Pingback: Where to get Individual Health Insurance Quotes online? | affordable life insurance
JSTOR has also eliminated the integration with ARTstor with this new interface. We are new subscribers to ARTstor and during trials last spring were impressed with the link to ARTstor from a JSTOR search result. We contacted JSTOR earlier this summer to set up the integration and were given no indication that this feature would soon be discontinued. JSTOR says no one was using the link. Does anyone else miss the integration with ARTstor?
“in other words, users want to know if an article exists even if they don’t have access to it.”
http://scholar.google.com
Well said. That’s pretty disgraceful.
Kristen: “So, in other words, users want to know if an article exists even if they don’t have access to it. This presents a conundrum for us in that we don’t want libraries to feel pressured to purchase but we also want users to know that articles do exist. ”
There’s actually a solution to that. It’s deeply imperfect, but it’s the solution we’ve got — OpenURL links. I echo Meredith’s comment that enabling OpenURL links only for articles already licensed is missing the whole point of OpenURL. The point of OpenURL is to let users of JStor find out in one click if their library has an alternate licensed copy of an article JStor provided citation but not full text for, by sending them to their libraries link resolver. That’s what OpenURL is _for_. If this didn’t come up in your design, I think you weren’t asking the right people the right questions.
Another solution would be making it as easy as possible to limit to just licensed resources, like putting the checkbox not on an out of the way ‘advanced search’ screen but right up front, and clearly labeled.
I sympathize with your goals here, but you have missed the boat on what actually serves your customers customers.
By opening up the entire JSTOR collections for searching without providing a method for linking to local holdings, JSTOR is setting up students and faculty to see purchasing information as the most expedient way to access it.
Dirty pool, JSTOR. Methinks you are trading on your popularity as a full-text resource and the knowledge that in this consumer culture individuals are well trained to pull out their credit cards when they find something they desire online.
If Wilson, Proquest, and EBSCO can handle embedding a link to local holdings, so can you JSTOR. Please investigate adding an OpenURL Link Resolver as soon as possible.
Actually, I think this may be resolved (pun intended). I checked our instance of JSTOR and located an article to which we do not have access. It led me to an abstract and SFX (our openURL resolver) for other potential sources of full-text in our subscriptions.
Fixed for us also. Our link resolver button is displaying for those articles with “External content. You may not have access”
I was furious to see these changes today while prepping to teach upper-level religious studies students tomorrow. Thanks for going in-depth on this issue, Meredith.
The company answer about discovery totally doesn’t wash with me. Who in their right mind is going to use JSTOR as a discovery tool? That’s crazy. I’m dumping this resource from my favorites list until they can get their act together and offer a platform that meets user expectation and actually works interoperatively with other library resources!
RE: “JSTOR says no one was using the link. Does anyone else miss the integration with ARTstor??
Me! This was a feature I heavily promoted and that our faculty and students loved.
Perhaps JSTOR needs to implement two solutions:
1. Allow libraries to embed our open URL links to materials we do not license via JSTOR
2. Allow libraries to set the default so that only the records for full text articles we license via JSTOR display.
For those who think that this is already fixed or have mentioned that you’re seeing a link resolver link to some articles, please see the update to my post at the bottom of the post. This issue is not yet resolved.
Thank you for putting JSTOR on notice that there are thoughtful users who won’t accept its pathetic effort to keep a tight lid on what is, by its very nature, an open system.
The irony here is that those with partial access to JSTOR are now experiencing the marketing whipsaw that those with zero access have had to put up with ever since Google spidered through the archive. They see links and often first pages of articles that either are unavailable, or cost upwards of $12, and as much as $30 or more for a few pages of archaic scholarship.
The solution is for JSTOR users to see that so long as their beloved database refuses to open itself (with micropayments or entirely free) to the world of knowledge seekers, it – and by implication they – betray the root and spirit of the Humanities.
Pingback: CBS Bibliotek Blog – Innovation & Ny Viden » Blog Archive » JSTOR skifter spor
“we may have launched this new feature before we had all of the necessary infrastructure in place to balance the interests of everyone – libraries, users and publishers.”
This, to me, is a major shift in mission. When JSTOR started, my sense was that it was intended to a) preserve core scholarly journals responsibly and b) to make it possible for libraries to avoid having to continually expand to house print copies. To carry these out, they asked publishers what it would take to do this without making their work unsustainable. Obviously, times have changed, but in this case it seems as if they were paying more attention to the interests of publishers than libraries, and that imbalance bothers me.
While I realize JSTOR has to keep publishers happy to provide their content at all, devising more toll access is not the direction in which we should be going.
Our art faculty and students will miss the ARTstor link.
So what’s weird is that yesterday, the link resolver wasn’t showing up in any of our yellow arrow results, and now it is. Did JSTOR change this?
That is weird. It was showing up in our yellow links yesterday.
Hello – as a first step to address the feedback and many helpful suggestions we have received, we are going to change the search default to search only content that is available as part of the collections licensed by the user’s institution. This change will apply to all search forms on the site, and we are endeavoring to complete this change by Monday, September 6. Expansion of OpenURL linking is the larger goal, but this change requires more development time. We will keep you apprised of our progress in this effort. Please see http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/libraries/regarding-august-21-jstor-platform-update for more info.
Tweeted about this snafu.. JSTOR sometimes seem like a lost child, or the TECHIES (god love ’em) are in charge instead of some type of manager. I love techies but you can’t let them steer the ship :)…
Best,
DrWeb
First of all – Thanks Meredith for looking into this and writing this post. It’s also great that JSTOR was able to respond so quickly and so honestly. It’s now sounding like JSTOR was trying to get new features released quickly and missed a few important things.
Just because I can’t let it pass, if I could point DrWeb to Paul Graham. This is what happens when you put MBAs in charge instead of hackers: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Thank you, Meredith Farkas. You did a lot of work to figure this out. I hope it’s gratifying to you to see how valuable your explanation has been to so many people, myself included, and what effect this discussion is already having.
Information is never free. (Neither is anything else, for that matter.) It feels that way, though, when the costs are borne by the institution that brings us a database. As a historian, I feel grateful to JSTOR for bringing back the pages I thumbed through in graduate school. It breaks the illusion of beneficence to be reminded of cost. Disillusionment may account for my and others’ hurt feelings at this change. There is also the more specific objection that the change was marketed poorly, which made bad news harder to take.
Pingback: Please Give Us Back the JSTOR of Two Iterations Ago « E-Views
Yes. Many thanks to Meredith. I fired off an angry email the day of the launch, got an autoreply -in which all the links were dead, btw – and haven’t heard a word since. I’m glad that your articulate post got their attention.
It’s very difficult for me to believe that JSTOR didn’t consider and develop a model that would allow us to embed our link resolver in the way we typically do. They successfully added ours to some records, without even asking us, so why not embed it in every result? Didn’t occur to them? Come on!
That does seem exceedingly slimy. One or two of those changes might be the result of really poor planning and lack of consideration (I’ve been seeing some of that with Lexis-Nexis Academic’s new interface and the rollout process for that), but all of them? And adding in the money element? No, that’s got to be deliberate.
I’d always thought JSTOR’s offerings looked really tantalizing, but now I’m exceedingly glad that our small college library couldn’t afford to subscribe to it. With the new quarter beginning soon, I don’t think I could cope with database angst on top of everything else.
Thanks for posting this! I saw some of the changes, but didn’t realize the full extent until I read this. It’ll definitely change the way I teach all of my library classes – why publicize JSTOR as a full-text database when it’s now becoming just a partial full-text database?
Hello – I have an update on the change JSTOR announced last week. Tomorrow we will change the default search for authenticated users to search only content for the JSTOR collections provided by their libraries. More information is available at http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/libraries/regarding-august-21-jstor-platform-update. – Kristen Garlock
Pingback: Weekly Link Roundup «
I’m thrilled to see JSTOR remove this ridiculous feature in their interface. It would be great now if someone could get Elsevier to do the same with ScienceDirect. We’ve been battling with them for months over the exact same thing. We can only afford to subscribe to one SciDir collection, Physical Sciences (which is still $12,000!). From day one, our users have been forced to see search results that included the entire SciDirect content. Since Physical Sciences is such a small percentage of their holdings, the majority of results were not available to us. This caused massive dissatisfaction on the part of both students and faculty. The Elsevier people we’ve talked to just don’t see why this would be a problem. If the voices of Meredith and others could move JSTOR, maybe we can get Elsevier to wake up, as well?
Pingback: I wouldn't have caught the JSTOR issues | Christina's LIS Rant
Pingback: Rundown of the new interfaces this summer | Christina's LIS Rant
Pingback: To live outside the law you should choose your targets carefully | DarkRepository
Pingback: Digital Tools, Trends, Debates – Reading List Compiled by Dorothea Salo | LILABRARY
Pingback: Post to HIST 390 (weekly) | HIST 390-001 The Digital Past