Paywalling Pays

Who knew Times' readers had it in 'em! The comments on the NYT's dull article about Aaron Swartz's liberties being stolen by JSTOR are fun!

Especially this one:

26.

Bill Harbaugh

Eugene, Oregon

July 19th, 2011

4:11 pm

Go to the IRS 990 for JSTOR,http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2009/133/857/2009-133857105-06a328... It's a "non-profit" dba "ITHAKA HARBORS".

I count 8 employees with compensation over $250,000. They put academic research behind a paid firewall, so they can bring in the money for these salaries.

Who is the criminal here?

The president of JSTOR, Mr. Kevin M. Guthrie, has a combined compensation of upwards of $420,000.

Aaron Swartz, JSTOR Misfit

Once upon a tome, Aaron Swartz saw an "open library"

JSTOR dreams it has a closed garden.

Into it crept an allegedly feral fellow.

To "steal" its golden apples.

Some apples!

The apples which are still there.

JUSTICE dreams

Petition here

Compliments of the public good

via Gracchi

There is a worrying trend in which the resources that you can use to do proper scholarship are falling behind subscription curtains - JSTOR, EEBO, the RHS bibliography- are all beyond access for members of the general public to inspect. I don't like this because I think scholarship should be open to access to everyone and I also think that if it isn't there are risks - there are risks to making access to knowledge conditional on holding an institutional subscription (step forward JSTOR) - I understand that there has to be an economic model to support such things - but on the other hand there is a complementary public good, that access to knowledge ought to be free.

Whether you call them academics or priests, exclusive castes who dominate access to knowledge are not healthy for society and the internet ought to be about opening knowledge to everyone- not just to those with a university login.

[Added later:] A glimpse into how one academic library (Hanover College's Duggan Library) values JSTOR:

In 2008, the Duggan Library subscribed to a total of 825 (and still growing) archived titles covering almost 26 million pages of content. This represents 6, 300 linear feet of shelf space. To put that last number in perspective, just imagine all of the periodical shelving behind the reference desk/collection on the first floor.

During the year there were more than 22,000 searches performed, and more than 62,000 viewed pages, with 4,857 full text articles downloaded representing about 5 downloaded articles per student FTE. Based on the cost of our combined JSTOR subscriptions we paid the equivalent of $1.84 per article. Compare this to customary interlibrary loan article fees of $10 to $20 and it is easy to see that we are certainly getting a good return on investment while helping ensure that our users are getting the academic support they require.

Comment: More data like this could lead to a sense of what might be a fair pricing mechanism for open, worldwide micropayment access to JSTOR. It would also be helpful to know how many people attempt to access information hiding behind JSTOR's walls, who are blocked, and how many have somehow hacked in.

My guess is that when all these numbers are brought into relation, we're looking at a low, eminently affordable micropayment scheme that would bring in revenue to JSTOR and its ilk, and permit everyone to use the research which it now wrongly hoards.

Hackers + Kindle = Open System?

Soy un Asco ponders the love/hate syndrome that is JSTOR, and dreams of unlimited access through Kindle.

So kack your Hindle.

Oh the humanities

Technology and changing habits have called into question the nature of the traditional humanities journal — a printed assembly of peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and notes and queries offered by subscription. "What we shared until recently was a sense that the academic journal appeared between covers as a deliberately constructed series of articles, sometimes on a common theme," Ms. Wheeler observed.

A journal started today, however, is likely to be online-only and open access [hanh?]. And more and more readers now discover bits and pieces of any journal's content — an article here, a book review there — through electronic databases and aggregators like

JStor, Project Muse, and Ebsco.

Editors of well-established humanities journals have mixed feelings about the changes.

More readers, more dollars: That makes editors happy. But they worry about how to carry the idea of a journal as an organized whole over into the digital world. "The journal itself becomes invisible to the end-user," Ms. Wheeler told her audience. Even as access to its content increases, "the identity of the journal is often lost."

"It's hard for me to imagine The Journal of American History becoming entirely digital anytime in the near future." — Edward T. Linenthal, editor

Europeana: a different model from JSTOR?

Europe's heritage went digital on Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Beethoven's 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.

Back from Paris and Marrakesh, Jon (Wirearchy) Husband (thanks Jon) points me to Europeana – a single access point to Europe's cultural heritage:

Europeana is a simple but powerful tool for finding resources from all over Europe. Books, journals, films, maps, photos, music etc. will be available for everyone to consult – and to use, copyright permitting. For example, the library will be a rich source of materials for the creative and information industries in developing new products and services, for tourism and for teaching.

The new site says it began receiving 10 million hits per hour, and crashed. It expects to be back in December. More here. And:

Europeana . . .will initially offer access mainly to items in the public domain.

But the European Commission said it was in talks with cultural institutions, rights holders and technology firms about finding ways to add copyright material to its stock.  ZDnet

It does seem a bit in need of cash just to set up. The main point seems to be accessibility and simplification through a centralizing order (but not a centralized server).

Still, reading this:

The internet has created an unprecedented opportunity to make Europe’s cultural heritage accessible.

one sadly thinks of the capitalistic cordon-creating thinking behind JSTOR. Yes, one needs money to operate. But look at the pent-up demand. Micropayments of fractions of pennies could go very far.

At least we have the sense that over there, some hearts and heads might be in the right place:

The British Library is bringing some of the world's rarest books online, with the intent of giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing.

Google has opened the world to JSTOR, but not JSTOR to the world. Yet.

ya think?

There would be little use for large, subscription-based archives like JSTOR if scholarship and research is released online for free. link

De-privileging the known

Frank Paynter points me to 

Guerilla Open Access

Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. more

Aaron Swartz invites the Internet to be, and remain, the Net, rather than a strip mall of private corporate preserves. At least when it comes to human knowledge. It would seem unnecessary to advocate that knowledge, the roots of cognition for the species, be open and available to all. But it is. 
The known ought to be the non-problematic bit. But it isn't.

snort

Here is one survey of explanations for interest rate swaps.  The explanations mostly seem lame and question-begging to me.  Here is another survey of potential explanations of interest rate swaps.  Good luck and I hope you have JSTOR access.  $

Clouds and walls

Amazon's Cloud:

"We routinely send people monthly bills for 17 cents," Bezos said. "If you store a gigabyte of data for a month, we'll send you a bill for 15 cents."*

But you'll pay JSTOR or Projectile(vomit) MUSE $10, $15, or more for an article for dated research on some rarified academic subject...

Gavin Baker of SPARC has a podcast on changing the scholarly publishing market:

"The DOAJ is growing at a remarkable rate" - over 3,300 journals with total open access. See the DOAR.

*The 2008 annual subscription price for the journal Brain Research is $21,744.

The TRUSTed preserve of metastasizing communal citadels dedicated to the self-serving propagation of ignorance needs YOU

Do you thrive in a fast-paced team environment? Are you a creative problem-solver? Are you passionate about designing and building systems that make a difference? If yes, then you will find JSTOR's Interface Group a challenging and rewarding place to work. ???

..

JSTOR (www.jstor.org http://www.jstor.org/ ) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community discover, use, and build upon a wide range of intellectual content in a trusted digital archive.
..

Since its inception in 1995, JSTOR has grown significantly and will continue to grow.

Make that a Double Google-Effect

Bruce Heterick, whom I interviewed a while back about JSTOR's delightful notion of keeping the world from knowledge (here and here, not necessarily here), has "published" an article about one key feature of the matter, and of our discussions. It's called Measuring the “Google Effect” at JSTOR.

I can't provide a link to the article, because it's firewalled here. I'm sure there's much of interest in the article, and regret that not just JSTOR's resources, but even the conversation about Google's manifestation of those resources, is under wraps.

Adventures in JSTOR

Too much academia probably isn't good for you

I need to read an essay by Helene Cixous. ... I spend the rest of the afternoon in an abusive relationship with JSTOR. I login and search for the article. JSTOR denies all knowledge. Trusted Archives for Scholarship my arse. ... Google shows me the front page of the article in JSTOR. It looks so beautiful. I’m sure my article will be a total disaster if I don’t read it. I begin to feel like the wife in some old film like Gaslight with JSTOR as the husband trying to convince me that I’m insane, possibly in cahoots with Google.

via Text & the World

no shit, shyballs

Findings – JSTOR usage has expanded exponentially.
...
Google indexing has had the further impact of exposing the content to a very much broader audience, creating a new set of opportunities and challenges for the organization.

Article Information:

Title: JSTOR and the changing digital landscape

Purchase this document:
Price payable: GBP £13.00
plus handling charge of GBP £1.50 and VAT where applicable.
Purchase

Opener JSTOR in Bangor

JSTOR Access

After previously only be available to library card holders from within the Bangor Public Library, access to JSTOR is now available to card holders off-site.

Bravo Bangor! If JSTOR won't see reason, free the public, one hamlet at a time.

Also noted: recent discussion on Language Hat.

Update: Maine Public Library Card Application - via Mark Wood.

Accolades for JSTOR

With a few preoccupations we've nearly failed to note these recent outpourings of praise and acclaim and admiration for our favorite closed noetic loop:

JSTOR, get out of the way

JSTORE [sic] is taxing public knowledge in order to sustain its ability to block access to public knowledge.

Making JSTOR into a public treasure

JSTOR should find a way to throw open its doors.

THATCamp 2008: Text Mining and the Persian Carpet Effect

All of the following were touched upon as being barriers or challenges to text mining:

• access to raw text in gated collections (ie, collections which require payment to permit access to resources) such as JSTOR and Project MUSE and others.

A personal favorite, tho it's just a cite:

JSTOR Delenda Est!

snazzzzz

via ~

Sexy new JSTOR

Friday April 04th 2008, 6:12 am
Filed under: Database News, Library News, Search tips

The JSTOR database unveils a new interface on April 4, 2008.

Some of the improvements:
- “My JSTOR” allows you to manage and store citations. With your My JSTOR account, you can save or email citations or send them to bibliographic software like Endnote.
- Limit searches by discipline or specific journal title.
- Try the new “search within results” to narrow your original search.

For more information on the JSTOR upgrade, visit their sandbox.

undoctored photo via Alaska Report.

A preface is needed...

It could say:

Welcome. Hi. I'm the JSTOR Dwarf. Welcome if you are connected. If you are a member of a member. Of our subscriber base. Of our club, our magick rynge, our secret boke of mysterium, our lockdown, our profitably trafficked market in human knowledge. Our little pot of gold. Enjoy! -- The JSTOR dwarf.

In these videos, the JSTOR dwarf appears to be speaking from within the hall of the mountain king. Or maybe his head was a sausage length too far up his arse. It has a bit of reverb:

via

{update}: Archaeoporn suggests a more open model.

Nah

Break JSTOR!

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

what is the vertiginous chapati saying to me?

Free JSTOR