Delivering Impact of Scholarly Information: Is Access Enough?

" ... Our focus at ITHAKA, an international not-for-profit organization, is on using technology to advance knowledge and higher education as broadly and cost-effectively as possible. We were founded in 1995 and pursue this mission in ways that are transformative for people and for organizations, largely through three areas of focus and related services. First, we work to preserve scholarly materials, which are the building blocks of knowledge. Second, we provide access to these materials and work with researchers, teachers, and students to create continually better tools for their productive use and engagement. Finally, we conduct research and offer strategic guidance in the form of consulting, workshops, training, and publications to those primarily responsible for educating people and leading changes to improve higher education around the world. This article draws on our experience with JSTOR, our original and most well-known service. JSTOR is a large-scale digital library that provides access to scholarly materials to people from 170 countries. Although JSTOR is not an open access resource, as a mission-based organization, we have been committed to providing access to JSTOR as widely and as cost-effectively as possible. From our earliest days, we worked with foundations to fund and provide access to people at educational institutions in developing countries. As JSTOR established a reliable financial base, enabling us to be confident about our ability to fulfill our long-term promise to sustain the archive, we began offering the JSTOR library at very low or no cost to increasing numbers of institutions and people with fewer financial resources. For many years we did this exclusively through educational and other non-profit institutions in 94 countries. In 2011, we added programs to provide free access to portions of our journal collections directly to everyone in the world. Based on our experience providing free access to scholarly materials to people in developing nations, we find that access alone is not enough to ensure that information has the desired impact of increasing knowledge and understanding. Is the content being used? ..."