Access JAF Online to Support AFS

As you prepare for the new academic year, those of you who teach can provide an important—and easily accomplished—service to AFS. As you may know, AFS receives royalty income whenever someone views, downloads, or prints Journal of American Folklore materials from the online collections of JSTOR and Project MUSE. Almost all US universities, and a growing number abroad, subscribe to the JSTOR and MUSE collections that include JAF.

The royalty revenue from a JSTOR or MUSE view, download, or print is greater than what AFS receives in permission fees when the same JAF article, for instance, is included in a course-pack. This royalty income makes possible a number of important AFS activities that benefit the field in addition to supporting our ongoing scholarly publications work: providing annual meeting travel stipends; hybrid and virtual meeting access to scholars who cannot attend the meeting in person; subsidies for student and underwaged memberships; resources to support teaching, scholarship, and advocacy; and more.  

Here’s the service we’re asking you to provide: Whenever any of your courses requires students to use JAF materials, have your students access those materials on JSTOR or Project MUSE rather than through other means. This is easy to do: just include the JSTOR or Project MUSE URLs for JAF articles or reviews in the syllabi for your courses this year.

Thank you for your support of AFS and our field.