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2020 Publisher Digest Archive

  • Updated

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March

Working Together to Support the Scholarly Community

As we respond to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation, our highest priorities are the health and safety of our employees and their families, and our ability to continue to serve our community to support research, learning, and teaching around the world.
We have posted a webpage with information about the steps we have taken: ITHAKA's Response to COVID-19: Resources for our Community and Business Continuity. These steps include providing expanded access to JSTOR Archive Collections and ebooks for participating JSTOR institutions who are shifting to remote learning. One item is a new ebook collection freely available for any JSTOR academic or secondary school participant who does not license the ebook content through JSTOR. This new collection would not have been possible without the support of many of you. Thank you!
 
The webpage also links to research conducted by our Ithaka S+R colleagues to understand the impact on educational institutions moving from face-to-face instruction to various forms of online learning, including implications for academic libraries.

2019 Revenue-Sharing Payment for Archive Publishers

The webpage also outlines our business continuity plan and how we expect to continue to support access to the platform and payment disbursement. Because our staff is working from home, our 2019 revenue-sharing payments will be delayed. We understand that this delay may impact end-of-fiscal-year financial calculations for some publishers, and we are doing our very best to get all the payments processed as quickly as possible.
We plan to send payment reports and supplementary materials in mid-April; wire payments should be processed shortly thereafter. Check payments will be delayed more, but we are dedicated to mailing these out as quickly as we can.
 
We apologize for the delay and understand this may cause concerns and issues on your end. Please contact us at publishers@jstor.org if you have questions or special needs. We will inform you if there are any further delays due to the rapidly changing environment we are facing.

June

Expanded Access to JSTOR During COVID-19 pandemic

To support the scholarly community during this challenging time, we are extending our expanded access program for students, faculty, and institutions impacted by COVID-19. Institutions that have opted in will continue getting access to unlicensed Archive and Primary Source collections through December 31, 2020. Free access to over 32,000 books will be extended for participating institutions and secondary schools that have opted in through August 31, 2020. We have also opened up an expanded set of content to non-institutional users.

New Tools and Resources | JSTOR Publisher Support Site

In April, our Publisher Support team launched the JSTOR publisher support site on the platform that includes answers to frequently asked questions, as well as links to key tools and documents for Journals and Books publishers. Our goal is to better support you by making the most relevant program information more easily accessible.

A recent addition to the site is an updated list of HTML elements and attributes that are allowed for displaying text on ITHAKA websites, including for JSTOR publisher and journal pages. Our goal is to improve consistency and security across the ITHAKA websites, and these changes will address HTML features that enable vulnerabilities and exploits. Please contact publishers@jstor.org with any questions.

We are seeing strong interest in the new text analytics service, Constellate, that JSTOR and Portico are building. The Constellate text analytics platform provides the ability to text mine across your journals and has a substantial pedagogical focus. Our pilot institutions have been using it to deliver value to their researchers.

Platform Updates | Research Reports Now Openly Available on JSTOR

As part of our ongoing effort to broaden our free and open content, more than 23,000 research reports from 126 policy institutes in the JSTOR Sustainability and Security Studies thematic collections—previously accessible only to collection participants—are now freely available to everyone. These research reports join 6,000+ Open Access ebooks, 1.3 million freely accessible images on Artstor's Public Collections, and our rapidly growing new initiative for institutions to host their open primary source collections on JSTOR.

Open Community Collections

In recent months, more than 50 Open Community Collections have been published on the JSTOR platform, where they are freely accessible to all and integrated alongside relevant content. Encompassing a wide range of subjects, these primary source collections are part of a new initiative to help libraries, museums, and archives integrate their special collections more fully into the research and teaching workflow, alongside secondary literature already on the JSTOR platform.

The Impact of Open Access Latin American Scholarship

In 2018, JSTOR received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the digitization of 680 out-of-print ebook titles from El Colegio de México Press (Colmex) and the dissemination of those titles on an openly accessible basis. In a white paper on the Impact of Open Access and Latin American Scholarship (download PDF), we document the significance of this work, the process used to select and digitize titles, and what we've learned about the use of this collection. We hope this will benefit other initiatives interested in increasing access to out-of-print materials.

The usage of these ebooks on JSTOR has been significant. Every single title has been used at least once, with more than 500,000 total uses in 173 countries and territories.

Ebook Publishers: Access Your Usage Reports

We have updated our ebook usage reports to align with the COUNTER 5 metric of Total Item Requests, which combines chapter views and downloads, and improved the report format and delivery options. To access the reports, you'll first need to register for an admin account, then run or schedule reports in our new self-service admin portal; visit our support page for details. Note that if we had scheduled a report for you prior to March 2020, you will need to reschedule it.

A 20-minute webinar is available on demand (registration required) that reviews the available usage reports and demonstrates how to access and run reports.

DDA Trigger Threshold Update for Books at JSTOR

We recently changed our Demand-Driven Acquisition program to comply with COUNTER 5 standards. COUNTER 5 uses the metric “total item requests,” a combination of views and downloads. To determine the new trigger threshold, our team analyzed the historical data across all of our participants and found that seven COUNTER 5 item requests led to an equivalent number of triggers as our previous metrics, with less than a 1% difference between the old and new thresholds.

As a result, we have transitioned away from the DDA trigger threshold of six chapter views or four chapter downloads; instead, titles will be triggered on the seventh total item request. We are not projecting any negative impact on 2020 DDA revenue. As in the past, consortial DDA triggers will be customized based on the number of participating members.

Publisher Features: Data Stories

You can now download a PDF report of the growth of our books' Open Access usage over the past few years. (Note that the spike in “null” usage in the “Top 10 Usage by Country” graph reflects an outage we experienced from November to December.)

We are pleased to announce that in addition to our recently updated self-serve usage portal for Books, custom visualizations of both journals and books usage data will soon be available upon request. Stay tuned for more details!

Upcoming Meetings

Due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 JSTOR Annual Publisher Meeting will be held virtually. While we won't have the opportunity to meet with you in person this year, we hope the virtual space will create new possibilities for engagement and facilitate the attendance of more of our publishers. The meeting is scheduled for early Fall 2020. 

September

Working together to support the publishing community

We anticipate that the economic impact of COVID-19 will reduce revenue generated by JSTOR in 2020, but our Trustees made a decision on revenue share allocations for 2020 (to be distributed in 2021): a commitment to pay you the same total revenue share distributions by title for 2020 that were paid for 2019 (inclusive of Archive and Thematic Collection revenue collected from participating institutions, JPASS and the Corporate Collection, and any other supplemental payments as applicable). We hope this guarantee will help publishers in this difficult and unpredictable time.
 
You can read the details of the 2020 revenue sharing update reach out to publishers@jstor.org for any questions or comments.

Important Announcements

Complimentary Ebook Access has Concluded

Access to the ebook COVID-19 collection ended on August 31, 2020. We want to thank all publishers who participated and we will be providing you with usage of the titles you made available by institution and country. Overall, we had close to 4,000 new institutions sign up to the collection and this has led to an increase in ebook sales, with many institutions buying ebooks that had high usage in the COVID-19 collection.

Read more about COVID-19 expanded access for books and journals.

Webinar: Journals Publisher Reporting Portal

This 30-minute webinar provides an overview of the new usage reports for journal publishers. We look at the new reports, highlight the improvements on existing reports, and show where you can find additional resources.
New and improved JSTOR publisher reports: View Recording (registration required) 

2020 Virtual Publisher Meeting

Wednesday and Thursday, October 28-29

Publisher payments: Actions to Complete by the End of the Year

Preferred Payment Methods: Wire Transfers and ACH Payments

Due to continued stay-at-home orders, our staff is working from home until further notice and check payments will be delayed more than wire payments. We are doing our very best to get all the payments processed as quickly as possible, but we ask publishers to switch to wire transfer or ACH payments. You can complete this switch or submit your updated wire information now.
 
We apologize for the delay and understand this may cause concerns and issues on your end. Please contact us at publishers@jstor.org if you have questions or special needs. We will inform you if there are any further delays due to the rapidly changing environment we are facing.

Updated Tax Withholding Forms for International Publishers

If you are an international publisher, IRS tax regulations require a completed tax form — either W-8BENE or W-8EXP every three years — for any payment sent by JSTOR. We will be sending a separate communication to non-US publishers with details.
 You can read our guide and send any questions or comments to publishers@jstor.org.

Support for the Library Community

$4 Million Relief for JSTOR- and Artstor-Participating Libraries

As a not-for-profit, we have received our Trustees' approval on a $4 million relief initiative for JSTOR and Artstor participants. You can get the details in the announcement by ITHAKA president Kevin Guthrie.

Remote Access Support

Accessing JSTOR with Google Scholar Automatic proxy URLS on JSTOR

JSTOR partners with Google Scholar for more streamlined access to your library's licensed resources. Since December 2017, we have offered Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA), a feature granting students access to an institution's licensed content while away from campus.

Learn more about JSTOR and Google Scholar

Sharing JSTOR resources just got easier. When logged into a proxy server, JSTOR now automatically creates prepended proxy URLs. These links appear below the stable URLs. A URL with proxy provides direct access to JSTOR resources off-campus. Users can share links with peers, students, or in course materials so that anyone at an institution can easily access the resource.

Learn more about Linking to JSTOR Content

Accessibility Update

We are committed to ensuring digital accessibility for persons with disabilities. Our latest Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPAT) on JSTOR and Artstor demonstrate our level of compliance with both Section 508 and WCAG standards and guidelines. We have taken measures to support accessibility for users with disabilities, including persons using a keyboard and those with visual and cognitive impairments, while also ensuring content is available as scanned images and as PDFs.

December

Looking Forward with New Updates for 2021

In this Publisher Digest, you'll find a roundup of important announcements including key dates and updates for 2020 Revenue Sharing, a data story on emerging trends and content areas for grey literature from our editorial team, a recap of the 2020 virtual Publisher and Contributor Meeting, and some exciting milestones.
 We extend a sincere thank you to all our publishing partners for their participation and cooperation with JSTOR through this challenging year.

Important announcements: Key dates and updates for 2020 publisher payments

Updated amendments for Books at JSTOR: reminder that the Books at JSTOR Amendment was sent out in early November which requires a publisher’s signature. If you did not receive this amendment, or you do not feel like you will meet the December 31st deadline please contact us.

Books Deadline: 12/31/20

Updated tax withholding forms for international publishers: If you are an international publisher, IRS tax regulations require a completed tax form — either W-8BENE or W-8EXP every three years — for any payment sent by JSTOR. We have sent a final communication on Friday, December 11 to non-US publishers separately with details. If you have received this communication, please return the completed form by Thursday, December 29, for the appropriate tax withholding rate to be applied to your upcoming 2020 publisher payment(s).

You can read our guide and send any questions or comments to publishers@jstor.org.

International Publisher Deadline: 12/31/20

Updated payment and contact information for publisher payments: In late November, our Finance team confirmed e-check is a new payment method available to publishers alongside wire transfers and ACH payments. While this method is available, we ask publishers to switch to wire transfer or ACH payments if
they can. Wire or ACH payments are faster to process and more efficient to send / track; e-checks take more time to set up and, once processed by our bank, it is cut as a hard copy check and mailed directly to the publisher.

You can update your information for any payment method by going to the following support page and completing and submitting the wire transfer request form

Upcoming End-of-Year Payments and Invoices

As this year is coming to a close, we are preparing to send publisher payments and invoices in Q1 2021 for the following programs and services:
  • Payments
    • Q4 2020 All Books
    • 2020 Annual and Q4 2020 Publisher Sales Service (PSS)
    • 2020 Revenue Sharing
  • Invoices
    • Q1 2021 Journals Hosting Program Fees
    • 2020 Member Access (invoices will be sent in Q4 2020)

More details will be sent separately for each payment and invoice.

Explore Emerging Trends and Content Areas for Research Reports

TextMiningGraphic2020.png

The above text graphic was made using a combination of text mining techniques that identified the most common terms, phrases, and named entities from the reports used throughout 2020 (significant text includes "China," Climate Change," "Artificial Intelligence," "Covid-19," and many more)

Terms were then scaled based on usage, giving us a clear picture of the seminal issues and topics of the year.

In 2016, grey literature (research reports) was added to the JSTOR Archive for the first time as part of our Sustainability Collection, and since then, we have preserved over 25,000 reports, covering everything from foreign policy to public health.

This content is written and published quickly in response to events unfolding in the present day, providing unparalleled currency. In a year as storied as 2020, this graphic and related reports serve as bellwether for the content interests and research needs of users, today and beyond. Climate Change and China topped the list, while terms related to COVID-19, artificial intelligence, and national security were also prominent.
 By exploring data in novel ways such as this, publishers can identify emerging trends and use evidence to shape their content strategy for the new year.

Revisit the 2020 JSTOR Publisher and Contributor Meeting (virtually)

JSTOR hosted its first virtual Publishers and Contributors meeting in late October, with great engagement from our publishing partners. In this virtual format, our teams experimented with new tools for engagement and broadened current conversations happening around COVID-19.
 
Key Takeaways from the Meeting:
  • We saw record-setting numbers with 267 publishers registered. Those who could not attend received links to the session recordings within a week.
  • Registrants attended from over 16 countries outside of the United States.
  • We piloted a dedicated Slack channel allowing publishers to interact with one another. We were able to provide instant answers to questions and incorporated polling real-time during sessions.
  • Sessions were a combination of live and recorded sessions:
    • Day one featured general updates about JSTOR's near-term focus and impacts of the current environment to publishers.
    • Day two included more in-depth sessions about our journals and books programs, as well as new opportunities for open access.
Now that this year's meeting has concluded, we are committed to applying the lessons we learned improve our future events. We encourage you to view the recordings and provide any feedback you may have.

News and Happenings at JSTOR

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