I’ve posted before about the coronavirus “silver lining” of the (partial) opening of access to peer-reviewed literature that some academic presses have been offering through the Covid-19 pandemic. Peer-reviewed literature is the bread and butter of scholarship, and access to it is not just a perk of being in academia, but one of the only ways it’s possible to stay on top of the thinking within any field of scholarship. The fact that only those who are in universities can regularly access these journals (and the fact that so much ill-digested information is much more readily available online) is one of the great barriers to a “knowledge society.”
Unfortunately, the current economic crunch in academia has meant that many universities and colleges (including my own) have been cutting back on full access to scholarly journals. When you can’t browse a journal to know what kinds of conversations go on within it, you cannot get a good sense for the field that it represents. So it’s a good idea to take advantage of any opening of access, even a temporary one, to peer-reviewed literature. Among the best journals databases is JSTOR, which has made a lot of its journals and some electronic books available — through to the end of 2020 — either to the broader public or to member institutions which typically only have partial access to its database.
Below is a representative sample of the journals, of possible interest to readers of this blog, which JSTOR is currently offering to anyone affiliated with one of its participating institutions. That, unfortunately, limits access to this list to university students and employees; apologies to the rest of you. However, there seems to be a “free read-online policy of up to 100 articles per month; register for that here. (And those of you who’ve followed this blog longer should be aware of other ways to get scholarly literature even if you are not affiliated with any academic institution.)
Several university presses have made e-books available as well through JSTOR; that list can be found here. The list includes Columbia, Edinburgh, Fordham, Harvard, Princeton, U. of California, U. of Minnesota, and Yale university presses — quite a formidable list! (For instance, see U. of Minnesota’s list here, and Harvard’s here.)
Go here to access any of these JSTOR titles.
Available journals include:
- Critical Inquiry
- Cultural Anthropology
- Cultural Critique
- Cultural Geographies
- Current Anthropology
- Ecología Política
- Environment and History
- Environment and Society
- Environment, Space, Place
- Environmental Philosophy
- Environmental Values
- Ethics and the Environment
- Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography
- Global Environment
- Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
- Nature and Culture
- Organization & Environment
- Resilience: Journal of the Environmental Humanities
- Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society
- Wicazo Sa Review
See also JSTOR’s Sustainability thematic collection.
One other journal worth mentioning that isn’t on the fully open-access list, but that seems to have made its last five years available to anyone (and that should be of interest to readers of this blog) is Process Studies. For all the interesting work that’s being done in a range of fields with Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy in recent years, Process Studies still remains the main scholarly journal singularly devoted to Whitehead’s philosophical legacy.
