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Comment by zymhan | Hacker News Reader

>How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs

Knowledge is power.

So, pay for access, or go to your local library, or browse the internet, or get free access in a similar way that Aaron Swartz did? Knowledge often requires funding to be created in the first place.

Why does every research team and lab use SciHub and/or Library Genesis?

I mean, they don’t, exclusively, or no-one would be giving money to JSTOR. And certainly, no-one would be scanning millions of old journal articles for free.

Comparatively few individuals are giving money to JSTOR these days.

Mostly institutions that they’ve previously captured.

And yes: not sure how you missed it, but for like a decade or more people have been scanning in millions of papers and books.

I don't know where people get the idea that JSTOR is one of the bad guys. It's a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access. It costs money to do that. What specifically have they done that you disapprove of?

I don’t know where you got the idea I was talking about my opinion of JSTOR.

Beats me what you're talking about, then. The literal answer to your original question is that people use SciHub and Library Genesis because they're free. But they're free because they infringe copyright. Maybe Swartz was opposed to copyright per se or maybe he was trying to make a point about free availability of journal articles associated with publicly funded research. Either way, JSTOR is the wrong target. JSTOR doesn't hold the copyright on those articles. JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access – which is exactly what Swartz seemed to be in favor of.

It’s free AND convenient.

Shortening path and timelines to info, innovation, further research.

That’s the end of the calculation.

The rest is just money-clutching noise.

> JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access

Just link (or specifically mention) a few things they’ve done that people really appreciate.

No need to keep repeating the claim.

JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives. That's useful to anyone who wants to read an old journal article without going to a physical library. I used to have to go to the library, dig out the relevant issue of Linguistic Inquiry, and photocopy it. Then in 2015, JSTOR started providing access to the entire scanned Linguistic Inquiry archive, so I could access all of those issues digitally.

I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.

Public money does go to the costs of that.

That’s where most of the PDFs come from.

Hmm, no. In the case of old print journal archives scanned by JSTOR, it's JSTOR paying the cost of the scanning.

Anyone can scan, host, and curate - including one or many peers.

We do not need any entity in between researchers and other researchers.

Practically speaking, no-one is going to scan centuries' worth of historical journal articles for free. And JSTOR isn’t really an entity outside the research community; it’s a non-profit that grew from within it.

I think we’re talking past each other mostly because I start to lose value on most research for my topics of interest that are more than two or three decades old, let alone five or six.

This may be different for others.

So, this discussion started with me saying that:

> [JSTOR is] a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access

You'd think that would pretty obviously include the vast swathes of material published before the internet and PDF preprints were a thing (and the considerable amount of subsequent research that just never got uploaded to anyone's website, for whatever reason).

Okay, so why can’t the volunteers scanning for Anna’s Archive perform this again?

Why does it need to be technically centralized and politically weak?

Anna's Archive is primarily a meta search engine. I see that they've put out a call for volunteers, but I don't think any significant part of their archive consists of volunteer scans.

As to your 'why' question, we're talking about boring, thankless work that in many cases breaks the law. It's not exactly surprising that we don't see millions of people signing up to do it for free!

I don't understand your second paragraph.

I simply don’t see JSTOR outlasting (as an organization, or a technology/archive) individual contributors and torrent trackers.

Solution which does not require millions of people =]

At present I don’t see individual contributors making any significant contribution towards scanning old academic journals. Why would this change in the future? There was at least a decade where the technology to enable this existed, and where most older issues of most journals were not available online, and yet the army of volunteer scanners failed to materialize. Now that there is already a non-profit doing this archival work at very high quality and with economies of scale, it seems even less likely that such a volunteer effort will materialize. But if you want to prove me wrong, get off HN and go scan some old journal articles!

Probably just going to keep reading the news ones,

and if I want to synthesize information from old ones, I’ll query a robot.

This is still research we’re talking about, right? Not a first-edition of famous literature?

'Research' includes subjects such as history, where old documents are important for obvious reasons. Besides such cases, I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history.

>I’ll query a robot.

Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!

> I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history.

For certain sciences, 36 years is two lifetimes. Like I said: we’re talking past each other due to our research needs.

We're talking past each other because you only care about your own research needs and apparently can't see any value in opening access to documents which other researchers might need. I am not a historian, but even so, it's not lost on me that a historian might want to access some old documents. Just because you think that JSTOR isn't useful to you personally (though, I can guarantee that your 'robots' have been trained on it) doesn't mean that it's not serving a useful function to the academic research community as a whole.

One can imagine the quality of research in fields where researchers can't be bothered to read anything that wasn't published in the last five minutes, and rely on other people's partial and possibly inaccurate summaries of key results. But that is another topic.

> JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives

So does SciHub.

SciHub mainly redistributes scans of print archives made by JSTOR and other organisations. And it does not have everything that JSTOR has. For example, this paper is not, as far as I can tell, available on SciHub:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178697

Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place:

https://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-and-apex-covantage-mark-2...

Are you being intentionally obtuse?

If the JSTOR copy didn’t exist, the pre-print copy would be scraped from the author’s website,

or the text / results submitted by the author or someone close anonymously.

Less, more slowly, but the same point.

Sure, we’ll scrape journal articles from the 1950s from the authors’ websites...

Many more recent articles also aren’t available on the authors’ websites, such as the one I linked.

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