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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't the whole thing that they allowed free unrestricted access to the JSTOR database from MIT IP addresses?

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.

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>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.

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.

~200 staff? Sounds like an awful lot. And I imagine the front end and backed are kinda done now so after a couple of devs maintaining the system, a sys admin or two, some testers, hr and ceo that leaves ~190 scanning in the documents. Or am I oversimplifying this?

Not really. Compare their operating budget with Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenburg has two part-time employees. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Li...

Well, there you go.

Sort of like Wal-Mart having 300 employees per store and only two of them on checkout lines.

So, you're saying that the final versions of the paper are not available in digital form pre-press? That's not meshing with what I know about how academic publishing works.

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.

Only if you can justify why you need ~200 staff in the digital age when most if not all research papers are made in electronic format and don't need to be digitized.

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?

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