JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles | Hacker News Reader

JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles

chronicle.com

28 pointsFluidDjango7 comments

I'd be quite surprised if they allowed write access.

(Yes, they mean "no downloads", but it's a rather ridiculous way of phrasing that. And if you can read it, you can save it for later.)

LOL, that was my first reaction too. What if people did have write access though? I guess it would just become another Wikipedia.

What on earth does "read-online access" mean? Are they making people use some kind of Flash application to read them (so you'll have to screencap important stuff), or are they just blocking access to the PDFs?

I would continue by asking who on Earth let people with such poor technical knowledge run a major academic publisher, but I have a funny story about an internship several years ago at another academic publisher.

Circa 2005, IIRC, I sat in on a sales meeting where I was told that the company was seriously considering requiring institutions to buy microfilm copies of journals in order to get online access, as their margins were higher on microfilm. Or something like that.

JSTOR is not a "major academic publisher" at all. It originally sprung up as a consortium of University libraries who were looking for a way to digitize decades of back-issues of old journals, which they could not afford to store in hard copy any more. Now it's (I think) an independently operated nonprofit. Like everything in the non-profit and academia sectors today, they are resource constrained, so you should cut them some slack for not hiring 37 Signals to redesign their web interface.

Thanks for clearing that up. They are a very different sort of organization than the one behind my old summer job.

That being said, I don't really care what their Web interface looks like, but the wording used in this press release is not related to reality, and that bothers me.

I wondered if it was just a misunderstanding by the OP but it's the same language on JSTOR's site: http://about.jstor.org/rr

>> "Register & Read Beta is a new, experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars..."

I dont think it's too geeky to point out that the use of "read-online access" indicates a poor understanding of digital tech and rights management and the web in general. Reminds me of the article posted the other day about how the no-fly list might be circumventable with a DOM editor.

Actually, I think it indicates a pretty good understanding of their target audience. Although DRM can be circumvented by cutting and pasting, the hassle of doing so on an academic article would soon reach the point where the average academic would rather just pay the damn fee to download a copy.

At least I know I would, and I've paid a fair bit to JSTOR this past year...

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