- Alumni are soon going to be able to freely access all articles.
- Registered researches can access all articles for free.
- Anyone can now read three articles every two weeks for free.
Doing what you say would immediately shut down JSTOR and they couldn't continue to process new articles, provide full-text search and so on.
Is JSTOR a friend or an enemy of my vision? Three articles every two weeks - sounds like an enemy.
As lovely of an idea as that is, someone has to write the backend, design the front-end, scan tens of thousands of documents and provide full-text search for them. Prior to JSTOR, these documents were trapped in university libraries, and you would have no feasible way to access them. I think they share your goals, and any problems you have with their operation is due to external factors (publishers, licensing, etc.).
Simply publishing everything for free is an absolutely sure-fire way to see no new content from JSTOR and a huge setback for the digitization of physical articles. Your proposal is a ridiculous over-simplification.
>Is JSTOR a friend or an enemy of my vision? Three articles every two weeks - sounds like an enemy.
How often do you read JSTOR articles? Personally, I don't power through a math paper in a single day, but maybe you're brilliant.
This limitation is not their fault. You're angry at the wrong people.
A researcher doing a literature review can easily get through fifty papers in a week. Most of them we scan to get the gist and follow up on the references looking for the few things we really need to read properly. This is a key research skill acquired by reading hundreds, eventually thousands, of papers. You get really good at it.
And that's just the papers you want to read. For each one of those I might download three based on a promising abstract to find the thing is irrelevant after all.
Thus an independent researcher with only public JSTOR access is seriously disadvantaged compared to a subscriber.
All Aaron Swartz did was jack into an Ethernet port in a closet that was unlocked in an MIT building, and get an IP address from an unsecured network at MIT, and then wrote some Python scripts to work as a web robot and pull down articles. The web robot did the same thing as any user at MIT could do, read and download papers.
So yes it is possible to allow free, unrestricted access, JSTOR just decides to only do that to certain IP ranges. If they allowed that with everyone, Aaron wouldn't have to jack his laptop into an unused open closet to pull articles.
In fact there was no real crime committed, other than trespassing at MIT, and MIT didn't press any charges to that effect.
I'm not talking about hosting or downloading. I'm talking about the digitization of documents and to pay the salaries of their ~200 staff.
If jstor is digitizing papers from before the pdf era then that's fine but those papers produced today are all available in digital format long before they get to jstor.
What do they do as well, watch Youtube videos most of the time and then scan in those rare research papers that are submitted in hardcopy format? The 1% of submissions that are actually in hardcopy and not RTF, DOC, PDF, ePub, Mobi ect formats?
No problem - as all the open-access publications and archives in the world will attest (PLoS, arxiv). Give us the access and get out of our way. You will be amazed at the ingenuity of free people.
>"How often do you read JSTOR articles? Personally, I don't power through a math paper in a single day, but maybe you're brilliant."
When I was in grad school, I would skim dozens of articles to find a few that I wanted to read deeply. The way that we use open information is qualitatively different than rate-limited information. It's just not the same.
I volunteer, where do I sign up?
Count me in, though (given that it'll actually be about opening access to things that weren't open before).
That's better than 0 articles per week that you get with most other academic publishers; and also what you'll get if JSTOR shuts down. In conclusion, JSTOR is not an enemy of your "vision".
I find this statement to be a lie. I agree with you @jacoblyles. I feel the same 100% and JSTOR is not a friend of science.
Why not? And more importantly, why couldn't "putting themselves out of business" be their goal?
Most of us have no problem if on-line solutions disrupt private sector business. But we get all gooey and stupid when it's a not-for-profit, like they get a pass because they're supposedly doing good.
Frankly, if you can't service the needs of society, then you deserve to be made irrelevant. JSTOR should be able to process and index academic journals without six-figure salaries and Manhattan offices.
-the first point is not even rolled out
-there is no such thing as a registered researcher. The institution needs to register
-the last point you mention got rolled out only 5 days ago.
JSTOR has more negative than positives. I cannot think of one positive thing in this day and age about JSTOR. It should be open. Period. There hand will be forced someday and the great part is, as usual, it will be too late and they will be a history.
Without JSTOR: there would be no online access at all to many journals, and there would be many with online access between individual paywalls at the individual journal.
With JSTOR: online access is available to many journals it would not otherwise be available for; online access is greatly more convenient for many for-pay journals than it otherwise would be.
How can you not see positives in this? They are strictly making things MORE accessible than they otherwise would be.
Would it be better if these things were even more accessible? Sure--but these are things JSTOR does NOT own the rights to.