Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals.

JSTOR was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites, and originally encompassed ten economics and history journals.

[8] With the success of this limited project, Bowen, Fuchs, and Kevin Guthrie, the then-president of JSTOR, wanted to expand the number of participating journals.

Until January 2009, JSTOR operated as an independent, self-sustaining nonprofit organization with offices in New York City and in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Users may create focused sets of articles and then request a dataset containing word and n-gram frequencies and basic metadata.

[19] Reveal Digital is a JSTOR-hosted collection of documents produced by or about underground, marginalized and dissenting 20th century communities.

[20] Reveal Digital's open access content includes zines, prison newspapers, AIDS art, student-movement documents, black civil rights materials, and a white supremacy archive.

[3] JSTOR has been running a pilot program of allowing subscribing institutions to provide access to their alumni, in addition to current students and staff.

According to Harvard Law professor, JSTOR had been asked "how much would it cost to make this available to the whole world, how much would we need to pay.

"[24] In late 2010 and early 2011, Aaron Swartz, an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist, used MIT's data network to bulk-download a substantial portion of JSTOR's collection of academic journal articles.

[25][26] When the bulk-download was discovered, a video camera was placed in the room to film the mysterious visitor and the relevant computer was left untouched.

Rather than pursue a civil lawsuit against him, in June 2011 JSTOR reached a settlement wherein Swartz surrendered the downloaded data.

[27][28] Prosecutors in the case claimed that Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.

In September 2012, U.S. attorneys increased the number of charges against Swartz from four to thirteen, with a possible penalty of 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

The Swartz controversy and Greg Maxwell's protest torrent of the same content led JSTOR to "press ahead" with the initiative.