Librarians or Administrator

Want help managing your institution's JSTOR account? You've come to the right place.

WELCOME AND THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING JSTOR!

You should receive a welcome email from support@jstor.org or techsupport@jstor.org. This email confirms your licensed collections and the access methods we currently have on file for your institution. If you'd like to find out more about the wide variety of access methods available to participants, we have more information about supported access methods in the Toolbox section.

Once you have your welcome email, you are ready to start using JSTOR. You can verify that you have access to the appropriate content by looking for the Provider Designation Statement (PDS). This is a statement at the top right corner of the JSTOR pages. Your PDS should say:
"Your access to JSTOR provided by [Your Institution Name]."

Logo images and links can be added to this statement by contacting support@jstor.org. We'll let you know what we need and work with you to get the look and feel you want.

USAGE STATISTICS

Usage Statistics can be a good indicator of how your patrons use JSTOR. To start, you'll want to create a MyJSTOR account. You can do this by hovering over the MyJSTOR label at the top of any JSTOR webpage. This should show you a drop-down menu with a list of options. You can click on MyJSTOR or My Profile to get to the registration page. JSTOR usernames and passwords are case-sensitive, so make sure that you make a note of any capital letters used. We have a video about how to register at the top of our "Independent Researcher" page. Once you complete your registration, you will need to accept our Terms & Conditions. You should then see a CAPTCHA image. If this is missing, please contact us. You can learn more about CAPTCHA in our "Toolbox " page.

Once you've created an account, call or email us with your username and ask to be added as an administrator to your institution's account. Once you're attached as an administrator, you can log into your MyJSTOR account and choose "Usage Statistics" from the MyJSTOR drop-down menu.

After you click 'Usage Statistics' you will be directed to the COUNTER 4 interface. You can also find the interface at https://www.jstor.org/analytics/

From here you can get 2015 reports. You can request results for the previous month as early as the first of the next month. It should also be noted that the COUNTER 4 interface has its own menu. The default landing page will be the "Create Report" screen, but you will see links to "Report History", "Schedule Reports", and "Reports Help" as well.

The following reports are available:

Journal Report 1 – Number of Successful Full-Text Article Requests by Month and Journal
Journal Report 2 – Access Denied to Full-Text Article Requests by Month, Journal and Page-Type
Journal Report 5 – Number of Successful Full-Text Requests by Year-of-Publication (YOP) and Journal. This replaces the JR1a report, and can also be used in lieu of the non-COUNTER JR1b report.
Book Report 2 – Number of Successful Book Section Requests by Month and Title
Book Report 3 – Access Denied to Book Content Items by Month, Title and Category
Consortium Report 1 - Number of successful full-text journal article or book chapter requests by month and title. This is a report for consortia.
Consortium Report 2 - Total searches by month and database. This is also a report for consortia.
Database Report 1 - Total Searches, Result Clicks and Record Views by Month and Database. This report now tracks usage for 19th Century British Pamphlets (previously recorded in the JR1 report).
Database Report 2 - Access Denied by Month, Database and Category
Platform Report 1 – Total Searches, Result Clicks and Record Views by Month and Platform (previously the DB3 report). Please note that there is no longer a requirement for sessions to be counted.

How to get SUSHI reports:

To set up SUSHI, you'll need two things: A Customer ID and a Requestor ID. Previously, you could find this information in your MyJSTOR account. For now, you'll need to ask us for your Customer ID (it's usually derived from your school's website). Your Requester ID should be the MyJSTOR username of the administrator requesting the statistics. You can check if that's YOUR account by checking for the phrase "Usage Statistics" in the MyJSTOR dropdown menu.

If you run a SUSHI report and get wonky looking data OR an error, check the XML files of the Request and Response from the SUSHI request:

Things to look for:

A timestamp after the date. This is a major cause of errors and a known bug. Delete the timestamp and resend the request.
Is your Customer ID correct? These are case sensitive.
Is your Requestor ID correct? These are also case-sensitive.
Is your endpoint URL correct? It should be: https://www.jstor.org/sushi/

If everything looks good and you still have problems, contact us. Putting any of the following in an email would be helpful:

A screenshot of your set-up screen
What kind of SUSHI client you use
The XML files of the Request and Response from the SUSHI request.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT COUNTER 4

When creating a report be aware of the following:

The name of the report can't be altered after it's created.
Make sure you select the type of report you want to run. Otherwise you'll get a JR1.
You can schedule monthly reports, but the end date needs to be in the future. The report will not run until the first of the month, so you may want to run an additional on-demand report too.
THE AVAILABLE FORMATS ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT.
- TSV stands for Tab Separated Value. This format will generate a text file in which the contents have been separated into columns by placing tab spacing between values.
- XML stands for Extended Markup Language. This format will generate a text file in which there is a specific type of programming language that will determine what values look like when they are displayed.
- Both of these format types can be opened with spreadsheet software like Excel.

You will receive an email when the report is ready to download. This email can end up in the Spam folder, so check there if you don't see it right away. If you still can’t find it, no worries, a copy can also be downloaded from the Report History menu in the COUNTER 4 interface.

COUNTER 4 will only cover 2015:

2014 COUNTER reports will be available upon request from JSTOR; prior year reporting as well as non-COUNTER reports (the Detailed and Summary usage reports) will not be offered. We encourage librarians who make use of historic usage data to download their pre-2015 reports now. We will also send out a series of reminders in advance of this change to report availability.

How to open your stats:

When a usage statistics report is generated, it will be downloaded in a .zip file which will contain your report in the format you selected (either TSV or XML). This file has to be opened and the contents extracted in order to be able to open the stats in Excel. You can find information about zip files and opening the files in Excel here:

DB3 and 'sessions' don't exist:

DB3 has been replaced by the PR1 report. The COUNTER 4 Code of Practice no longer requires reporting on sessions, so reports no longer have that information. COUNTER now requires Record Views and Result Clicks be reported instead. You will see these in the PR1.

You can find more information on the COUNTER 4 implementation website here. Database reporting requirements can be found under section 4.1.2.

SETTING UP YOUR DISCOVERY SERVICE WITH JSTOR

What we mean when we talk about Discovery Services:

The idea behind a Web Scale Discovery Service is to give your library users a single point of entry to your collection and its physical and digital content. There are layers to this sort of service which often include a central index and a link resolver. The index holds information (metadata including author name, issue number, volume, etc) about your collection while the link resolver takes the user directly to the content they're searching for. Generally, Discovery Services require regular upkeep and re-configuration as you grow or trim your collection.

How to put JSTOR in your Discovery Service:

If you manage a Discovery Service, you can use our Quick Reference Guides to help you best configure it. Our guides should help you make sense of your Discovery Service and allow you to surface all kinds of content, including articles, books and pamphlets on JSTOR. If these products aren't correctly configured, users can miss out on crucial stuff in your library. There's also information on how to construct OpenURL links to JSTOR; find KBART-compliant title lists for our collections and how we work with Google Scholar.

A note on OpenAthens

If your institution uses OpenAthens and you haven’t yet added JSTOR as a resource, you’ll need to set it up in your OpenAthens administrator interface in order to access JSTOR from this service.

Here’s what you need to do:

Log into the OpenAthens administrator interface at https://admin.openathens.net.
Select Resources > Permission sets
Click on the permission set that you want to change and then click on the Attributes tab (NB: the Role should already be set to ‘member’. If it is not, you should take this opportunity to set it to ‘member’).
Click on the ‘Add a resource’ button, type JSTOR into the dropdown field and then select the JSTOR item that appears:

Enter this text into the text box underneath JSTOR: urn:mace:dir:entitlement:common-lib-terms
If your permission set attributes now look like this, click on ‘Save changes’:

This will add the new JSTOR access point to your permission set automatically.
Please be sure to contact us at techsupport@ithaka.org with your organization’s federation Entity ID information. You can find this information in the OpenAthens administration interface by clicking on Management in the menu bar and then selecting Organization & Entity IDs.

WHAT THE HECK IS A VPAT AND WHERE CAN I FIND ONE?

VPAT stands for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template and is a way to check for Section 508 compliance. (In case you aren't familiar with the history or content of Section 508 you can find some information about it on the following page.) Occasionally you may need a VPAT from JSTOR to verify that our website is generally accessible to people with disabilities.

Download our most recent VPAT.

You can learn more about our accessibility standards on about.jstor.org.