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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Well, there is a non-zero cost to hosting and delivering documents, as well as creating the infrastructure to allow it.

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).

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Also, JSTOR does NOT get those documents for free. They may have to pay the publisher to host them on their server.

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.

They may have to pay the publisher to host them on their server.

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.

Good thing that reproducing something, no matter how laborious the process, is not considered a creative act in the US.

No, but (IIRC) compilations that take serious effort to produce have a copyright on them, e.g. the phone book.

The content doesn't, actually. I'll look up the specific case when I get home, but phone book publishers most definitely do not have any copyright claims to the phone number or addresses. They do have copyright claims to the font choice, layout, etc., so you can't copy the phone book wholesale, but you can take the phone numbers, rearrange them, and set them in a different typeface and you'd be in the clear.

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.

> I'll look up the specific case when I get home, but phone book publishers most definitely do not have any copyright claims to the phone number or addresses.

Feist v. Rural

Yep, that's the one. The other one I was thinking of was Alfred Bell & Co. v. Catalda Fine Arts.

No, the phone book most specifically doesn't - which is why you get five phone books nowadays as competing companies try to sell ads all at once.

What about Springer or Nature publishing? Unfortunately, the real evil is rooted in a system that measures excellence based on publishing records and not scientific impact. Until there's a replacement for that, life scientists will keep sheepishly bowing to the publishers. That replacement could be an idea for a startup.

> Unfortunately, the real evil is rooted in a system that measures excellence based on publishing records and not scientific impact

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?

My ideal system would be a global open system where scientists would publish their results, not papers. Other scientists would be able to review, confirm and reuse your results transparently and third parties would be able to assess your position from your record and the feedback that you get from fellow scientists. That could involve many more signals rather than just the (journal+number of citations) that everyone uses now.

The point is that this action and aaronsw's action make JSTOR look like the villain while JSTOR are rather sitting on the good side of the battle.

(On the other hand, these actions do contribute to create public awareness so I still haven't decided if they are good or not)

it seems JSTOR is not pressing charges.

JSTOR does not get them for free, but it gets them for a lot less than you think and they make a lot more than you think they do. Here are two analyses of their finances based on their mandatory IRS filings:

- 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.)

Interesting figures. Something to think about. Thanks.

> Well, there is a non-zero cost to hosting and delivering documents, as well as creating the infrastructure to allow it

Sounds like a perfect job for bittorrent distribution....

The key issue with bittorrent is that if no one is seeding, the files are "gone". Further, ISPs like to block/filter it.

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.

Providing it as a torrent lower the costs at least. Plus, if they were concerned about infrastructure costs they'd have no problem finding mirrors willing to donate bandwidth.

And yet Wikipedia manages to do so without charging $19/article. :) Even for historic scanned books, e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake,_a_crit...

Likewise, archive.org does as well. I expect these papers will eventually end up in both these places.

Wikipedia is full of general purpose knowledge and paid for by donations. Even if you never make use of 99.99% of the knowledge it has, there is something for you, and a reason for you to donate.

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.

We have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these services than they would be for an academic journal hosting. If you didn't want to go the centralized method a small journal with under 1,000 readers (>10MB per month per user) could probably host buy hosting for under $100/year. Something that small would be easy to cover out of pocket or via donations

services like youtube and flickr have adverts corresponding to a user's tastes and the particular media. How would you suppose doing that with scientific journals?

> We have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these

Don't be so sure. Some experiments can produce large data sets, which ideally should be made available alongside the published paper.

Well, for most of the JSTOR documents that's probably not the case.

But yes sharing with large academic datasets is a real and only partially solved (IOW not solved at all) problem.

I work at a university. I don't think universities have any vested interest in maintaining their place of privilege. Certainly faculty members don't, with rare exceptions (at least one of which I know about).

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.

The issue is, university professors already have access to these papers. They are among the few people that want, need, and can understand the science behind it. It looks like it makes sense that universities are willing to pay for that privilege.

You forgot larger industrial research lab-y companies, e.g., Google and DuPont.

The quality of content on JSTOR is much, much, much higher than on Wikipedia.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Lamest_edit_wars

Which shunts the cost onto the taxpayers.

A lot less cost than the current cost of paying subscriptions to that same content.

There are a fair number of studies exploring the usage of P2P distribution of scholarly articles.

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.

LOCKSS[1] (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) has an algorithm that does its best to ensure you have a real copy and that no one can poison the network.

[1] http://www.lockss.org/

Simple, bittorrent has inbuilt hashing mechanism. Just host the .torrent file on your own server. Hosting a 20KiB file is cheap as chips.

This torrent in particular has that covered: he included an hash of the hashes file in the message, which is signed with his PGP key.

Yes, it's non-zero. But for many, many organizations and many individuals, the non-zero is pretty much zero. The Internet Archive, for example, could absorb something like this without even blinking. As could Google Books.

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