JSTORiana

The Technology Editor, ZDNet UK, finds something lacking in JSTOR's closed world formula:

ask any independent researcher. There are a lot of them out there, writing books, building businesses, experimenting with ideas, inventing the future, educating themselves, trying hard to participate in the great human endeavour of standing on the shoulders of giants. They will all have had the experience of finding exactly what they want, only to be told "NO".

It is extraordinarily frustrating, and the exact opposite of JSTOR's laudable aims. Furthermore, it is unthinkable that the situation will continue like this indefinitely. I cannot envision a future where this huge library of public knowledge is forever denied to those who need it. Every sign, every pointer, every tiny eddy in the tide, says otherwise.

The wall is pernicious. Break it down.

That guy up there is not the Technology editor, ZDNet, UK. He's Surinder Kumar Mandal of Bihar, India, featured in Jan Banning's extraordinary series of photos of Bureaucrats of the World. I have had that page of images open ever since finding it (I wish I could remember how) more than a week ago.

Why build a digitized scholarly archive, searchable via the public internet, if access to it is controlled like some kind of top-secret database?

That's Christopher Barden, a longtime reader of The Stingy Scholar, which seems to be some sort of educator's blog with, disturbingly, a very large standing image of Michelle Malkin in the right hand column, where indeed she belongs - not that she's standing, actually, one can't be sure, we only see a blow-up of the front of her head, i.e., her face, but the image is standing, sort of like a foetid pool of cess, right there on the right every time you flick or click to a story.

No, no, that's not Christopher Barden, up there behind the desk. That's Sergey Mikhailovich Osipchuk, policeman of Oktjabrskij, Tomsk province, Siberia. I wouldn't want anyone to confuse scholar/editor critics of JSTOR with deskwarming bureaucrats who seem to man their posts with a certain gatekeeperly determination.

There must be some connection with the whole JSTOR thing, I just can't put my finger on it. . .



P.S.: "Chris," a commenter at The Stingy Scholar, asks who to sue at JSTOR and PROJECTilevomit MUSE, calling them jointly "the great firewall of America."