EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has announced the availability of JSTOR Open Community Collections through EBSCO Discovery Service™(EDS). EDS users will gain access to a breadth of freely accessible primary source content including artwork, photographs, publications, recordings, and other artifacts from library collections around the world, strengthening the depth and quality of their research.
Open Community Collections enables institutions to host their special collections on the JSTOR platform, making unique primary source collections discoverable to a large network of researchers, faculty and library users worldwide; universities don’t have to be JSTOR participants to access or contribute to Community Collections. EDS users will benefit from this trove of openly accessible content, introducing them to new avenues of research with seamless access to the information they need. By indexing open access content in EDS, researchers can receive access to comprehensive, reliable content.
Increasing discovery of open library content is directly in line with JSTOR parent non-profit ITHAKA’s mission of improving access to education and knowledge for people around the world, including by making it more affordable. It is particularly important in a post-pandemic world where libraries seek to transition to digital-first collections, and modes of learning are increasingly diverse. Currently, more than 200 institutions are participating in Open Community Collections, and they are sharing more than 1,100 collections that have been accessed by people conducting research at more than 10,300 institutions in more than 230 countries and territories.
EBSCO has made efforts and launched initiatives on the best way to support libraries with open access. One of these efforts is including more open access content in EDS. EDS employs enhanced search technology that is built upon superior subject indexing and the EBSCO Knowledge Graph. This type of search technology, along with the JSTOR integration, will allow these special collections to relevantly appear alongside other content types a library may subscribe to. The result is increased usage of this open-access content and a deeper understanding of topics through original materials including artwork, photographs, publications, recordings, and other artifacts.
EDS subscribers are encouraged to enable and/or contribute collections to JSTOR.
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