Can anyone explain why all these documents are not available for free? Why does the only place you can download them charge for the privilege?
Those costs must be made up somehow in the business model.
(before I get flamed, I'm not arguing that all documents should be $19 per article. I'm just saying that there's a non-zero cost that needs to be passed on to the customers somehow).
Sounds like a perfect job for bittorrent distribution....
Of course, a case could be made that university libraries should mirror all public domain digital documents of sufficient interest. Which shunts the cost onto the taxpayers.
Regardless, the cost still is non-zero, and someone has to bear it.
Likewise, archive.org does as well. I expect these papers will eventually end up in both these places.
Academic journals are full of incredibly specific knowledge. While some of it is accessible to people with a moderate amount of intelligence/diligence, any journal whose name isn't "Science" is designed for and by an incredibly small group of individuals with an incredibly specific knowledge base. Where is the donor base for that?
Answer: Universities are the only plausible donors. And they seem to think maintaining their place of privilege in being able to access the articles is worth some extra bucks.
Don't be so sure. Some experiments can produce large data sets, which ideally should be made available alongside the published paper.
But yes sharing with large academic datasets is a real and only partially solved (IOW not solved at all) problem.
But I think there is not a lot of interest in changing the system. The people who could change things are not directly affected by the disadvantages of the current system.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Lamest_edit_wars
A lot less cost than the current cost of paying subscriptions to that same content.
One issue that would need to be satisfactorily (and simply) dealt with is trust that the copy you have is the authoritative copy of record.
Academic publishing is a bitch and there is a lot going on lately towards a common, world wide reform. However, JSTOR is not really the bad guy here. Other publishers (e.g. Elsevier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier) make billions by publishing mainly work payed with tax payer money.
Not in this case, apparently; they're public domain. Although JSTOR did foot the bill for the scanning.
I'll take your other point, though: if there's real evil in the academic publishing world, it's Elsevier.
I don't believe there's any part of copyright that takes the amount of effort into account. There was a case (again, I'll look it up when I get home) where a copy of a work that was in the public domain was granted its own copyright because it had a few errors in it. The errors were unintentional, but copyright was given. In the phone book case, the court specifically mentioned that even though there was no doubt a significant amount of work required to produce the phone book, that didn't give the publisher copyright.
Feist v. Rural
Can you clarify this a bit? How do you get to have impact without first publishing it somewhere (at least mildly reputable) and having other people actually read it/review it/run with it?
(On the other hand, these actions do contribute to create public awareness so I still haven't decided if they are good or not)
- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-July/1092...
- http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...
Summary: they take in >53m USD. Publishers get 8m of that. Their IT infrastructure costs 4m. All the new material and scanning old material cost 5m.
(Notice how many millions are left over. They all go to staff, travel, and other goodies like that. The management is generously compensated.)
Because they can.
When JSTOR was first getting off the ground 15 years ago, many of us had higher hopes for the organization's direction, that it'd eventually be a mixture of subscription-only access for recent non-open-access journals, and free-to-anyone digitization of old, public-domain materials, like a large-scale version of Project Perseus. But nobody at JSTOR really pushed the 2nd part; they digitized old documents, but kept them all subscription-only, and never even developed plans (despite occasional agitation) for individuals to buy subscription access for any sort of reasonable price. They seem to have developed a bit of an unhealthy attachment to "owning" the JSTOR archive as their valuable crown jewel, despite officially just being custodians of it on behalf of the academic community.
What follows is third hand information and not even directly related to JSTOR. So it could be totally wrong. But I am told that at the moment not all of the journals/articles in all areas are available to universities outside the US. Apparently it is hard to get hold of research related to subjects that the US thinks are not "exportable" because of potential impact on national security. Things like nuclear medicine, areas of chemical engineering etc. The journal publishers act as a point of enforcement in this story.
I guess that they are not a public company, therefore unfortunately perhaps we can not have any access to the revenue data to determine whether they are making any profit and how such profit is being used. In that case, most probably the safe bet is to decide that they are making profit. If, however, they are in fact not making any profit because their archiving and maintaining of these documents is paid off by the subscription charges, then this torrent does a disservice to science rather than acting as a liberator.
Without that information however I do not think it is easy, or indeed possivble, to rationally decide.
My guess is that their reticence to open things is more of an institutional megalomania of sorts. Sort of what you often find at art museums--- while their official mission is to promote the arts and educate the public, many of their staff are at least as interested in building the prestige/fame/fortune of their institution, which explains why they would have weird policies about reproducing their public-domain artworks.
While there is great value in the JSTOR articles (all published before 1923)- in reality very few active researchers will be reading them. Some of the research will be just plain wrong, some corrected or superseded, and if there is any useful stuff left, then it will be readily found in much more modern and useful presentations.
I think the more important battle is to ensure all current research is deposited in open archives (preferably something like arxiv.org). The historical stuff will surely follow...
http://arxiv.org/help/support/2010_budget http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper
It's hard to say how necessary a budget of that size is, made harder by the fact that they publish absolutely nothing about who they are, what they do with the money, how they plan for it, etc. The only source of financial information is their legally mandated annual IRS filing.
There's an attempt to sort some of it out here: http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...