Nah

Break JSTOR!

Nothing new here - an upgrade to same scarcity intelprop model.

Share the Love

I hate JSTOR.

A grad student's elegiac envoi to JSTOR

Haikus: I miss JSTOR (grad students will understand)

My dearest JSTOR
Now that you are gone I know
You were good to me

Is that your JSTOR burning?

[Anthony] Grafton is a much-honoured history professor at Princeton, a tonsured member of the cathedral who can lightly toss off the aside that JSTOR – that bastion of academic apartness, still unavailable to individuals – is now indexed by Google and thus easier than ever to access.For the rest of us, that indexing just pushes our noses up against the stained glass. Goodwins.

the expensive JSTOR

RAT on JSTOR

The Roman Army Talks of, but fails to conquer, JSTOR.

Crimson opts to Obviate Anachronism

All for Open Access
Let’s welcome the end of for-profit academic publishing
Published On Tuesday, October 02, 2007 12:22 AM
By THE CRIMSON STAFF


It seems that the for-profit academic publishing industry’s days are numbered...

more at JOHO.

OA: Obviate Arseholiationism

Reminder to US citizens

Please contact your Senators this week, and ask them to support an OA mandate at the NIH. Here are some links to help:

• The alert from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. This includes some useful background and talking points. (Also see my blog post on it with comments.)
• The alert from the American Library Association. This includes a web form to make it easier to get your message to your Senators.

via Open Access News

Udell on what we don't have: Shared Context

Some points on open access beautifully made by John Udell, timely ripped from the womb of the very engaged Open Access Blog of Peter Suber:

Jon Udell on access to public data

Hugh McGuire, Interview: Jon Udell, DataLibre.ca, August 5, 2007. Excerpt:

2. what do you think is the most compelling argument for making public data available to citizens?

Well it’s ours, our taxes paid for it, so we should have it. But the compelling reason is that we need more eyeballs, hands, and brains figuring out what’s going on in the world, so that when we debate courses of action we can ground our thinking in the best facts and interpretations....

8. what do you think are the connections between open access to public data and other similar movements - free culture, free software etc?

There’s an arc that runs from free and open-source software, to open data, to Web 2.0-style participation, and now to the collaborative use of software, services, and public data in order to understand and influence public policy.

9. with your crystal ball, where do you think the confluence of these movements will take us in, say, 5 years?

I’m sure it won’t happen that soon, but here’s what I’d like to see. Imagine some local, state, or national debate. The facts and interpretations at issue are rarely attached to URLs, much less to to primary sources of data at those URLs and to interactive visualizations of the data. We spend lots of time arguing about facts and interpretations, but mostly in a vacuum with no real shared context, which is wildly unproductive. If we could establish shared context, maybe we could argue more productively, and get more stuff done more quickly and more sanely.

While the idea of shared context seems to go against the drift of David Weinberger's sense of things in Everything is Miscellaneous, there is, I think, a deep affinity. After all, what Weinberger is talking about is the breakdown not so much of shared contexts as of traditional, factitious, arbitrary contexts imposed by middlemen, media, Aristotle fetishists, etc.

While I don't think Weinberger devotes enough attention to the new middleman, Google,* I think it's pretty sure that the breakdown of the bogus contexts he envisions is part of a reconstruction of a far richer sharedness of things.

Elsewhere in the interview Udell says:

Here’s an argument I don’t buy: That amateur analysts will do more harm than good. I don’t buy it because there will be checks and balances. Those who don’t cite data will be laughed at. Those who do cite data but interpret it incorrectly will be corrected.

A reasonably Weinbergerian sentiment, it seems to me.

*I noticed after writing the above that David addresses this very criticism here.

fuck you all and to all a good night

“University Publishing in a Digital Age” – a report sponsored by Ithaka and JSTOR.. . . was released late last week. On Thursday, IHE ran a detailed and informative article about the Ithaka Report, as I suppose it is bound to be known in due time. The groups that prepared the document propose the creation of “a powerful technology, service, and marketing platform that would serve as a catalyst for collaboration and shared capital investment in university-based publishing.”

Clearly this would be a vaster undertaking than JSTOR, even. The Ithaka Report may very well turn out to be a turning point in the recent history, not only of scholarly publishing, but of scholarship itself. Scott McLemee, "Sailing from Ithaka" (bolding mine). See also here, here ($), here, etc.

From the Ithaka report:

“A shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities could allow them to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, unite the resources of the university (e.g. libraries, presses, faculty, student body, IT), extend the brand of American higher education (and each particular university within that brand), create a blended interlinked environment of fee-based to free information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors.” (italics mine)

Guess the report has thought of everything...

- pregnant pause -

except how, freed from the shackles of intellectual proprietorship, shared scholarship could allow universities to educe, enlighten and empower the human imagination.

Update: blogs take up the Ithaka report: Dorothea, Free Range Librarian, MediaCommons.

Dorothea: "Bite the bullet and go open-access."

two (or parenthetically three) words

AKMA notes a development in university publishing.

Then there's this:


They do offer individual subscriptions to rare eggs enrolled in certain learned societies:

INDIVIDUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS

Individual subscriptions are now available for a small additional fee through membership to the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), two of the participating learned societies of HEB.

When one dispassionately examines the rationale for this sort of privatized, hedge fund-ghettoized gatekeeping, one finds there is none.

Two words to all you learned society types: Open (fucking) Access.

Science withdraws from JSTOR

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of Science, has broken from JSTOR.

JSTOR's disappointment.

More from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Inside Higher Ed.

CNET mindlessly lists JSTOR under "Free information for the taking." Information may want to be free, hard-won knowledge categorically ought to be free. So here's a schedule of JSTOR's non-free fees to participating institutions.

Free JSTOR! Only intellectual property can be captured; intellect, not so easily.

Open library, locked blog

I almost forgot to post what I was originally going to post:

let us build the Open Library.

I'm not sure whom Aaron is addressing here, but by all means, let us. via JOHO.

Whatever can be done to push back against the JSTORs, MUSEs, Comcasts, News Corpses, New York Timeses and other children of intellectual proprietary darkness.

JSTOR: Two clarifications

After my last conversation with Bruce Heterick of JSTOR, I had a few more questions, but our schedules didn't match up. I appreciate his making time via email to offer a couple of clarifications, address three follow-up questions, and share pointers for help with a fourth.

Heterick said my account of our talk was "fair and accurate," with two exceptions, one major, one minor:

Exception #1:

Heterick: "The minor exception has to do with your characterization of “pay-per-view” via JSTOR" [quoting from my post]:

JSTOR hadn't thought of offering a pay-per-view access before Google crawled its archive. Now, as of January, JSTOR has invited its publishers to make their titles available to unaffiliated researchers on a pay-per-view basis. Only about 150 titles are currently available, and the pricing is entirely at the publisher's discretion - which is not necessarily within most readers' reach (I've heard various prices per article: $35, $60 -- who do they think they are, the New York Times #

"Certainly, in the whole of the pay-per-view world, there are some article prices that approach the prices that you’ve referenced in your post. In JSTOR’s Publisher Sales Service, however, the average price per article is about $14, with the majority of articles available in the $4-$10 range. Perhaps those averages will move (up or down) as more participating publishers decide to offer individual article purchases via JSTOR, but that’s the data we have at the moment. The service has been popular in the brief time it has been available (I think something like 6,500 articles have been purchased thus far), so some folks are finding it helpful."

Comment: Fourteen dollars for a superannuated scholarly article - or even a brand new one - seems excessive. The internet holds multitudes, and lends itself to micropayments. E.g.: Let's say a library pays $10,000 for a year's subscription to a substantial collection of old journals -- perhaps a few million pages worth. Let's say two million pages, though it could well be more. That comes to $.0005 per page. And that gives hundreds, or thousands, of students and professors unlimited access to the journals. So, why not offer a pay-per-view model that charges individuals $.0005 per page? Granted, single downloads would not add up to much, but over time, as people became aware of the quality, scope and depth of the scholarship, volume would build. I'm not aware that JSTOR would be risking anything here, since its current subscription model would still be intact - there would just be more revenue, to allocate however it might choose. A win-win. (Update: Micro is the new macro)

Exception #2:

Heterick: "The major exception has to do with the discussion around 'open access':"

JSTOR is looking at other ways to not simply emulate Kafka. In fact, says Heterick, it once did explore an individual access model, but ran into "difficulties" -- still, the goal of open access is very much on its mind.

“It’s not a question of if we should do it but when we can do it and not devolve our preservation goals,” he says. “Would people or libraries be willing to pay to maintain JSTOR and maintain its long term mission of archiving? We don’t know… .”

Would institutional libraries continue to pay the subscription fees if the journals were openly available to all? #

Heterick: "It isn’t really the case that JSTOR is thinking about “open access” as much as I was carrying forward the notion that JSTOR is always trying to “open access” more broadly to other communities (e.g. secondary schools, public libraries, developing nations). That is an important part of JSTOR’s mission (to extend access as broadly as possible), so perhaps I should have used the phrase “broaden access” instead of “open access” to avoid the confusion with much more highly-publicized “open access movement”(OA)."

Comment: I am now officially depressed. I might have misheard or misconstrued Heterick's remarks because I hadn't heard him say that there was a definite policy at JSTOR that would preclude exploring Open Access in the full sense of the term. Apparently JSTOR doesn't believe that knowledge, the scholarly intelligence of the humanities, belongs to us all. I believe JSTOR is wrong. Such knowledge is not the property of some university, archive, or middleman. It took a lot of generosity on the part of a lot of people contributing to a lot of nonprofit institutions to foster the facilities, time and wherewithal for serious scholarly work. To turn around and now tell us that the fruits of those long labors are the private stash of JSTOR and its publishers is to fail to see that the only reason the human race tolerates these institutions is in hopes that they will open our eyes, expand our minds, and give us a chance for a more human, liberated world. To commodify the fruits of this vinyard is to err in understanding the core value and original purpose of the humanities, and of education in general. A catastrophic failure of intelligence.

I'll save Bruce's responses to my follow-ups for another post.

Setting it free

A link on David Weinberger's blog goes to an interesting article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review entitled If You Love Your Information, Set It Free. Yesterday, when I clicked on it, an interstitial something or other advised that one could quote up to 500 words of the article and no more. That bit of reintermediation doesn't seem to be there today, but if one searches for the article at the Review's site, one arrives at this:



It's unclear what exactly I am purchasing if I purchase copyright permission. Am I paying for the right to set David's article free? Am I under some limitation to be specified in the fine print of whatever I get when I buy permission?

What exactly is the institutional understanding at Harvard of the meaning of the work of someone like David, a Berkman Center fellow who has been an apostle for freeing information, whose latest book prophetically and proleptically sees it as inevitable?

What if I gave myself permission to cause the article to appear, say, here, without purchasing a download, a pdf, or copyright permission?

Dissent does not dissent from marketing format

Democracy Now offered a worthwhile segment today of War Made Easy, Norman Solomon's dissection of USian war stupidity, over the last half-century.

The portions broadcast offered a range of strategic media manipulation, ranging from the explicit to the implicit (a new set design for the "war room" to make the Pentagoons look cool), etc.

It ought to be getting a little clearer to Harry Hummer and Suzie Sixpack that, across the mediascapes of radio, cable, newspapers, magazines, NASCAR events, Yellow Ribbon Magnet Manufacturers, War Marketeers of all stripes, etc., which are now their only eyes and ears, a scandal is constantly, nakedly recurring: the breaking of knowledge by power, the control of access to "intellectual property," that fake capitalist category, and the manipulation of phony psycho-public platforms as staging areas for simulations of critical assent.

So it was a bit dismaying to find so little shared substance of War Made Easy on the site created for it, which seems cast in the tired blurb 'n sell mold.

How come it hasn't been possible to put up a few clips from the documentary, a youtubation or two (where Solomon is already under attack), and a chapter from the book, a richer faq, etc. along with the pointers to where to buy the DVD?

the tres amigos.

Obscenity on the web

	RESOURCES FOR LIBRARIANS | RESOURCES FOR PUBLISHERS | PARTICIPATION INFORMATION

Mission and Goals

In the broadest sense, JSTOR's mission is to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technologies. In pursuing this mission, JSTOR has adopted a system-wide perspective, taking into account the sometimes conflicting needs of libraries, publishers, and scholars.

JSTOR's goals include the following:

• To build a reliable and comprehensive archive of important scholarly journal literature
• To improve dramatically access to these journals
• To help fill gaps in existing library collections of journal backfiles
• To address preservation issues such as mutilated pages and long-term deterioration of paper copy
• To reduce long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of journal collections
• To assist scholarly associations and publishers in making the transition to electronic modes of publication
• To study the impact of providing electronic access on the use of these scholarly materials

I'd love to know how they accomplish this last goal, given that their actual mission appears to be to protect the pulp, print and lumber industries by ensuring that no scintillae of intellect ever escape the JSTOR lockdown. And they split infinitives.