Online Access to Political Science Journal Archives

Since the launch of the Journal Storage Project (JSTOR) in 1995, APSA has played an active role to increase access to political science scholarship. Today, APSA members may choose to subscribe to JSTOR for the low rate of $25 per year and gain access to the full archive of APSA journals and to the archives of several other political science journals.

APSA subscribers to the individual access program may search or browse the archives of 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 (from 1886-2002, thanks to the cooperation of the Academy of Political Science), and the Midwest Journal of Political Science (from 1957-1972). At the beginning of each year, the whole volume of each of the 3 APSA journals from three years ago is added to the JSTOR archive. For example, in 2008, the 2004 volume of Perspectives on Politics moved to the archive. (*)

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. 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.

Using JSTOR

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 older JSTOR articles. However, full articles can be printed from any desktop computer.
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(*) More recent volumes of the APSA journals are available online at the publisher's website. APSA members can access these volumes without charge by logging in to MyAPSA. Non-members can access the abstracts without charge, but must pay a fee for additional access.