JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization
with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of
important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals
as widely as possible. JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve
high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they
were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. Content in JSTOR
spans many disciplines.
Originally conceived as a project
at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR began as an effort to
ease the increasing problems faced by libraries seeking to provide
adequate shelf space for the long runs of backfiles of scholarly
journals. JSTOR is not a current issues database. Because of JSTOR's
archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between
the most recently published journal issue and the content available
in JSTOR (see JSTOR: The Moving Wall for more information).