Comparison

JSTOR vs Doaj

JSTOR lands on Depends, and Doaj lands on Worth it.

JSTOR

Depends

Confidence: Medium

Use it if you're a student or researcher whose library provides access . it's the standard scholarly archive with a free account tier.

Worth it

Confidence: Medium

Free, community-funded index that is the de facto whitelist for legitimate open-access journals . researchers, librarians and funders should use it.

JSTOR versus Doaj
Compare	JSTOR	Doaj
Verdict	Depends	Worth it
Best for	Students and academics	Researchers vetting open-access journals
Who it's not for	Casual readers without a library login	Buyers wanting a purchasable SaaS tool with support SLAs
Privacy	No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.^³	No public vulnerabilities found for DOAJ itself; a 2025 XSS CVE affects a third-party WordPress export plugin, not.
Support quality	Help center exists; no quality evidence	No support quality evidence in sources
Public sentiment	Quora and Reddit users treat JSTOR as the credible scholarly default but gripe about paywalls and home-access friction.^⁵	Researchers and librarians treat DOAJ as the free go-to whitelist for legitimate open-access journals, while some debate whether it carries the same weight as Scopus.¹⁵
Biggest gotcha	Solo researchers face per-article fees or the JPASS subscription; Quora users call pricing expensive.^⁵	Fake journals claim DOAJ indexing; always verify on itself, not the journal's site¹³