That's interesting. A quick Google says they do exist for some universities in this country, but not the one I went to AFAICT which explains why I've never heard of such a thing.
Posted Jan 22, 2013 11:55 UTC (Tue) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848)
[Link]
It's up to the university to do the authentication. So for 3 the places I've been with JSTOR access I've been redirected to a university page to enter username / password, and once that has been satisfied I'm passed back to JSTOR logged in.