To the Editor:
Robert M. Kaplan’s essay “What RFK Jr. Got Right About Academic Publishing” (The Chronicle Review, June 20) is right: Scientific publishing needs an overhaul. While it’s helpful to look to JSTOR’s nonprofit model for inspiration outside the sciences — he gets important details wrong.
First, JSTOR is not a publisher. We are a nonprofit organization founded to provide shared infrastructure to help libraries manage scholarly journals that were taking up valuable shelf space. We now preserve and provide access to millions of journals, books, images, and primary sources in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
Kaplan suggests that “oversight could be entrusted to a respected nonprofit body — perhaps modeled after the National Academies — ensuring that decisions are guided by a commitment to scholarly communication rather than corporate profits.”
He is describing JSTOR. Our fees for Archive Journal Collections do not rise annually, as Kaplan asserts. We have not raised fees for access to our JSTOR archive collections for 30 years. That is leading with one’s mission.
Second, Kaplan writes that JSTOR’s “model prioritizes access stability over cost reduction, offering no relief from the broader system of inflated publishing expenses or restricted access to research.” That statement is simply not true; actually, it is nearly the opposite of what we have done. During the pandemic we decreased fees and expanded the amount of content available at our participating institutions. From that experience we developed our full access model, which offers institutions the entire journals database for a very affordable escalation from their current fees.
By reducing costs, we have greatly expanded the availability of scholarly content worldwide. More than 14,000 institutions in 190 countries or territories participate in JSTOR. It’s free for institutions throughout Africa and 50 other countries. The public has access through free reading programs and growing open access material.
No model is perfect, but the goal is to provide as much access as possible while sustaining these resources for future generations. We agree with Kaplan that nonprofit organizations play an important role in this ecosystem and appreciate this opportunity to share how JSTOR contributes to that objective.
Kevin Guthrie
President, ITHAKA
Founding President, JSTOR