JSTOR vs OpenAlex
JSTOR
jstor.orgOpenAlex
openalex.orgSide by side
| Figure | JSTOR | OpenAlex |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $16.58/mo | $1/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 9 |
| Spec score · Academic Research Databases | 8.8 (#4) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Company size | LinkedIn lists JSTOR as a nonprofit with 201–500 employees and headquarters in New York, New York. | LinkedIn lists OpenAlex as a nonprofit research-services organization with 2–10 employees. |
| Founded | LinkedIn lists JSTOR’s founding year as 1995. | OpenAlex's transparency page says Impactstory incorporated in North Carolina in 2012. |
| Support | JSTOR Support accepts requests by email form, phone, and text, and says form responses typically arrive within one to two business days. | Member includes community support, Member+ includes ticket-based help for critical API bugs, and Partner includes full ticket-based support for API and data issues. |
| What it does | JSTOR is a nonprofit digital library combining peer-reviewed journals, scholarly ebooks, primary sources and millions of images. | OpenAlex is an open index and knowledge graph covering scholarly works, authors, sources, institutions, topics and related entities. |
Plans
JSTOR
- Read onlyFree
- Read onlyFree
- JPASS Monthly$19.50 a month
- JPASS Monthly$19.50 a month
- JPASS Annual$199 a year
- JPASS Yearly$199 a year
- Institutional accessPriced on request
OpenAlex
- Pay as you go$1 a month
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
- FreeFree
- Pay as you go$1, paid once
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
In their own words
JSTOR
JSTOR is a research and learning platform with scholarly and primary-source material across more than 70 disciplines. Its collection contains more than 12 million academic journal articles, millions of primary sources, ebooks, and Artstor images and multimedia. Advanced search and discovery tools help locate content. Workspace lets users save, annotate, organize, upload and share research in folders, then export it as PDFs, PowerPoints or ZIP files. A free personal account can read up to 10 eligible articles online every 30 days, though publisher policies exclude some articles. Users may connect a personal account to a subscribing institution for remote access. JPASS Monthly costs $19.50 per month and includes unlimited reading from 2,400+ academic journals and 10 PDF downloads per month. JPASS Yearly costs $199.00 per year and includes 120 PDF downloads per year. JSTOR supports mobile browsers, keyboard navigation and screen readers, and accepts requests for accessible versions of content. Its audience includes students, educators, librarians and researchers.
OpenAlex
OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of scholarly research, with a REST API for querying connected records such as works, authors, sources, institutions, and topics. API users can search, filter, sort, group, page through results, select fields, and retrieve individual entities. The complete database snapshot can be downloaded from Amazon S3 without an AWS account, and the data is released under the CC0 public-domain license. An official command-line tool supports bulk downloads with parallel transfers, checkpoints, rate limiting, retries, and resume. Full-text access provides PDFs and machine-readable TEI XML; each file download costs $0.01. Website exports include CSV, RIS, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects through the API. OpenAlex also offers Unpaywall's legacy-format open-access API, including a browser extension and integrations with SFX, EBSCO Discovery Service, and 360 Link. Its coverage includes journal articles, conference papers, books, chapters, datasets, dissertations, and preprints. OpenAlex is operated by a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its code is open source.