Access the Journal
The Journal of American Folklore is available in digital and hard copy through a variety of resources, including your AFS membership benefits.
Hard Copy
- Members of the American Folklore Society receive four issues each year.
- Available hard copy back issues are available to AFS members for $15 and to non-members for $25. To purchase a copy of a back issue, members should contact AFS at [email protected]. Institutional inquiries should be directed to the University of Illinois Press at [email protected].
Online Access
- The full text of issues of the Journal from Volume 114 (2001) to the present is available online through Project MUSE. AFS members can login for complimentary access to JAF available through Project MUSE as a benefit of membership.
- Those with access to a university library should have access through the JSTOR to the full text of back issues of the Journal from 1888 to five years ago. AFS members can login for free access to JSTOR’s folklore journals as a member benefit. This program provides access to back issues of JAF along with these other journals in our field: Folklore, the Journal of Folklore Research and its predecessor the Journal of the Folklore Institute, and Western Folklore and its predecessor the California Folklore Quarterly.
- Full text from recent Journal issues is also available in thirteen other databases to which many public libraries subscribe.
The contents of JAF from 1888 through 1987 are indexed by author, subject, and title in The Centennial Index: One Hundred Years of the Journal of American Folklore published as JAF 101:402 in 1988. This index was extended by seven more years in the 1988-1994 Supplement to The Centennial Index, published as JAF 107:426 in 1994. PDFs of the Centennial Index and the 1988-1994 Supplement are openly available in the AFS collection in the Indiana University ScholarWorks repository.
Multimedia
The Society and the University of Illinois Press maintain a JAF multimedia site where authors publish audio and visual materials to supplement their JAF-published work.
Open Access
JAF is a Green open access [OA] publication. Green OA means that AFS encourages authors to post pre-prints and post-prints of their contributions in temporary locations, such as personal websites, until such time as the publisher’s version is available. Authors may post publisher’s versions of their contributions to the repository of their home institution as soon as those versions are available.
Click here to read the Society’s complete Green OA policy
In response to the evolving nature of scholarly exchange and communications, in 2012 the American Folklore Society established the following policy regarding authors’ deposit of their Journal of American Folklore (JAF) contributions (including articles, reviews, notes, etc.) in their institutional repositories. This policy, which makes the JAF a Green OA publication, replaces any previous AFS author deposit policy, so it also applies to materials already published in the JAF.
Definitions
[These definitions are based on those on the SHERPA/RoMEO web site, which also contains information on the color-named levels of open access (www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html).]
This policy applies to pre-prints, post-prints, and the publisher’s version.
A pre-print is a work-in-process: a contribution not yet accepted, or perhaps even submitted, to the JAF, that you make available for comments and criticism from others.
A post-print is the version of your JAF contribution after peer review and acceptance for the Journal of American Folklore, with revisions having been made.
The publisher’s version is the PDF file of your contribution as it appears in the Journal of American Folklore.
Policy
AFS encourages authors to post pre-prints and post-prints of their JAF contributions in temporary locations, such as personal websites, until such time as the publisher’s version is available.
Authors may post publisher’s versions of their JAF contributions to the repository of their home institution as soon as those versions are available. When posting a publisher’s version, authors must include one of the following two notations:
For JAF contributions published before 2003: Published as [provide the complete bibliographic citation as it appears in the print version of the Journal of American Folklore]. © [Year] by the American Folklore Society.
For JAF contributions published beginning in 2003: Published as [provide the complete bibliographic citation as it appears in the print version of the Journal of American Folklore]. © [Year] by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Databases with JAF Materials
The JSTOR Arts and Sciences II Collection (which contains the Journal) and Project MUSE are not available at all colleges and universities, and only a handful of public libraries in the United States subscribe to these databases. However, full text from recent Journal issues is also available in thirteen other databases to which many public libraries subscribe. Some libraries allow cardholders to access these databases over the Internet as well as on site. Please note that the exact coverage years vary for each database.
OCLC First Search
Electronic Collections Online (ECO)
Wilson Select Plus
Periodical Abstracts (this database offers access to Journal issues included in ECO and Wilson Select Plus at libraries subscribing to these databases)
ProQuest
ProQuest Research Library
ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey
Literature Online
Literature Online Reference Edition
International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text
International Index to the Performing Arts Full Text
Questia (primarily by individual subscription)
Journal Collection
H.W. Wilson
Humanities Index/Abstracts/Full Text
OmniFile Full Text Mega
OmniFile Full Text Select
OmniFile V Full Text
Questions about accessing the journal? Contact AFS staff at [email protected].