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Comment by Caligula | Hacker News Reader

One of the tremendous values of being in a masters program is having access to JSTOR and all the other journal sources.

Before I would email the professor and request a copy, usually they would oblige.

This is actually the thing I miss the most from my graduate days.

JSTOR is a gold mine of wonderful knowledge: you can search for any word you like and instantly be connected with hundreds of years of very intelligent scholarship. You acquire a feeling of immense humility at the breadth of things known to humanity but not to yourself. Surely this is something sorely missing from contemporary civic society, and especially the freely-available discourse on the web.

Someone will make a lot of money if they can find a way to charge a reasonable monthly fee for temporary access to this knowledge without killing the golden calf of institutional subscriptions. It should be no different than the Encyclopedia, which was enormously valuable but didn't dry up demand for academic publishing.

It is my goal to have personal access to JSTOR by the time my kids can surf the web.

It annoys me that there's essentially a big cartel of the publishers and the universities and university students so that they can access it for free. And that's why it's been slow to change, the people who most want access already have it for free. It's the general public who are cut out. If graduate students had to pay the same fee as the general public, things would have changed by now.

General public is not anywhere nearly as interested as academia people. The ones who are in the greatest need of access to science journals are researchers, and since most of them work for public research institutions, they already have it. Undergraduate students don't really care about papers, because they're too advanced for most of them to grasp. That's why they use textbooks. People who are not connected with academia, but still want to have an access to academic papers, are a really, really small group, so it's no strange that nobody cares about them.

Or you can go visit your local library, which has access typically to most journals in digital form.

Really? Perhaps the British Library, yes, but not my local. Not even my university has access to most journals. Thankfully I have two separate accounts at different universities so I can usually find what I'm looking for.

Depends which country you are in - UK libraries don't usually have access to academic journals.

How about local university libraries then?

They are generally not open to the public, and when they are you are rarely allowed to access electronic journals because of the licence agreement which the university has signed with the publisher.

Same in the US.

At my local library (largest in my state) you have to be on one of the library computers to access any pay journals. Which is annoying, especially since I would have to wait for a spot.

Do most local libraries in the US really have unrestricted JSTOR access? Here only the University libraries have JSTOR and they only make it available to students and faculty.

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