Jisc and JSTOR are collaborating to support discovery, use, and impact of open digitised collections for the benefit of the research and teaching community and collection owners.
About Open Community Collections
Digital collections of primary sources and archival material can have a strong impact on research and education if embedded within the scholarly workflow.
Digital content is now more important than ever for research, teaching and learning and the Open Community Collections initiative provides an opportunity to leverage institutions’ own digitised collections and get more use out of them.
Open Community Collections unlocks the potential of an institution’s special collections by making them freely available on a platform already known and used by researchers, teaching staff and students.
UK institutions can maximise the reach of their unique, special and archival collections by freely participating in the Open Community Collections programme and hosting their digitised content on the well-established JSTOR platform.
How it benefits you
By sharing via Open Community Collections, Jisc members' digitised content will:
Reach millions of researchers around the world
Join the research workflow, integrated alongside relevant books, journals, and primary source materials already hosted on JSTOR
Appear in an environment with robust tools that aid discovery, use, and encourage connections for research and instruction
Be fully and openly accessible, not behind a paywall
Have a dedicated portal on JSTOR and increase your institution’s profile
The many collections already hosted on the JSTOR platform, from both the UK pilot scheme and overseas institutions, demonstrate a wide range of source formats and areas of interest, and include material as diverse as scrapbooks, cartoons, labour pamphlets, architectural photographs, fashion designs, feminist newspapers, and historical exam papers.
