A conversation with JSTOR's Bruce Heterick

I had a good conversation the other day with Bruce Heterick, Director, Library Relations, at JSTOR.

Some readers of IMproPRieTies may have noticed our recent interest in JSTOR, which mainly derived from (1) searching for certain topics in the Humanities and Social Sciences, (2) discovering with glee that interesting articles from scholarly journals are now online, (3) realizing with consternation that such articles lie behind an institutional barrier that blocks access to anyone not affiliated with a participating institution, and (4) registering puzzlement that anyone would take all sorts of pains to firewall knowledge -- knowledge mainly produced by scholars at not-for-profit institutions of higher learning devoted to bringing light into our world.

Heterick was generous with his time, and patient with my questions. The first thing to say is that the firewall was less an aim of the original design than a function of it -- i.e., they didn't create online access to valuable scholarly knowledge with the idea of enjoying being able to say "Nanni Nanni Boo Boo" to anyone lacking the requisite institutional handshake.

In fact, and here's the maybe-if-and-when good news, the presiding lights behind JSTOR are now looking at various ways and means to open its treasurehouse to all, because they understand that that makes all sorts of sense. They simply have to ensure that by doing so, they don't remove the parts of their economic model that have enabled them to build a self-sufficient, independent 501(c)3 organization in a relatively short time.

Let me back up and offer some of what Heterick shared with me about JSTOR (more background here and, in book form via here.)

The founding aim of JSTOR was less dissemination than preservation. The problem it was created to solve was the spiraling costs of library space required to house, redundantly, physical copies of hundreds of scholarly journals. William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, is credited with the idea of building a central archive that would preserve and curate complete sets of journals print editions, and become the basis for a digital archive libraries could access electronically.

The project began in 1995 with seed money from the Andrew Mellon Foundation with just a few titles, housing them in archives in California and at Harvard. Over time JSTOR has developed into an independent not-for-profit entity that currently holds some 900 titles (of which 725 or so are online, and the balance are somewhere on their way to digital existence) representing 23 million pages of content, 4 million full-length articles, spanning 47 academic disciplines. About 430 publishers participate in JSTOR currently; the strongest topic areas of the collection are in Economics and History.

The business model supporting JSTOR's evolution has worked like this: It invites publishers (primarily non-commercial, university presses) to participate, on the basis of various academic criteria. Any publisher who chooses to do so agrees that it will freely grant rights in perpetuity to all issues of the journal (1) going back to its first issue, and (2) going forward to a set time period prior to the current issue. Known as the "moving wall," this is a period anywhere from no time at all (in the case of one journal) to five years or more which the journal retains the rights, in case they have some economic value. So every year, a new year's worth of older issues automatically gets processed for and becomes part of JSTOR's permanent collection.

The publishers give their older content to JSTOR in part because they deem it to have little or no economic value. (Its epistemic value is another story.)

JSTOR scans the physical editions, and places the printed copies in its archives. The digital content is then grouped into one or more of 14 collections that JSTOR makes available to universities, research societies, government-funded agencies and other nonprofits on a subscription basis. A small research society might pay $300 annually for a narrow slice of the pie; large universities might subscribe to all the collections for several thousand dollars a year. Currently about 3,300 institutions participate, half in the US, half elsewhere, and about four-fifths of them are instititutions of higher learning.

With so much of its energy devoted to the muscle work of preservation, JSTOR has clearly prioritized its archival function. But it has along the way begun to look at the possibilities for more open access to its collections. Any qualifying institution in Africa can get access to its entire collection for free. There are special rates for high schools and an effort to get more public libraries to buy in.

Enter Google

Now, all this was taking place in the background, without much in the way of public notice, until last year, when JSTOR allowed Google to spider its online archives. Suddenly JSTOR articles began appearing high in people's google searches for all kinds of information, from Homer to Romantic Poetry to recent epistemology.

At which point, Heterick said, requests for JSTOR's online material "exploded." JSTOR found itself in the interesting position of letting it teasingly be known that it has an astonishing wealth of scholarship at the same time as it was saying to any unaffiliated researcher at its gate: "Not now."

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?).

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? On one hand, why should they? Still, it's not impossible: after all, JSTOR is ensuring the immortality of the work of...scholars at these same universities. It's also saving the costs of continually adding space. Until recently, those running our institutions of higher learning might not have recognized that value, but, Heterick says, that seems to be changing. They now see that they can create new more attractive kinds of learning environments (Starbucks in the reading room?) instead of facing the dull chore of finding places to add stacks.

In short, it's not for a lack of a will to disseminate that so much scholarship remains behind the JSTOR firewall, and that's good news. It's a matter of finding the right economics. One possibility: instead of pay-per-view, users could pay for a slice of time -- a day, week, etc. of unlimited access.

====

I've heard from a few people who shared my interest in access to JSTOR and to other virtual closed stacks, including Project MUSE and BioOne (thanks to Frank Paynter for the latter).

Your turn: Thoughts on this? Suggestions for a more open business model? Philanthropists! Got a few million smackers to put it all right?

[Long overdue update: A follow-up to this discussion, here, contains two significant and deflating clarifications.]

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.

So many of you to thank for keeping me hot!

Danielle S. Allen

Dean of the Division of the Humanities
University of Chicago

Henry S. Bienen

President
Northwestern University

William G. Bowen

Senior Research Associate/President Emeritus
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Laura N. Brown

Former President
Oxford University Press

Nancy M. Cline

Roy E. Larsen Librarian
Harvard College

Ira H. Fuchs

Vice President for Research in Information Technology
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Kevin M. Guthrie

Chairman, JSTOR Board of Trustees
President
Ithaka

Mary Patterson McPherson

Vice President
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Michele Tolela Myers

President
Sarah Lawrence College

W. Taylor Reveley, III

Dean, The Marshall-Wythe School of Law
The College of William and Mary

Judith Shapiro

President
Barnard College

Michael Spinella

Executive Director
JSTOR

Stephen M. Stigler

Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor in Statistics
University of Chicago

Herbert S. Winokur, Jr.

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Capricorn Holdings, Inc.

---

Trustees Emeriti

Richard De Gennaro

Founding Trustee Emeritus, JSTOR
Roy E. Larsen Librarian, Emeritus
Harvard College

Charles R. Ellis

Founding Trustee Emeritus, JSTOR
Senior Advisor, Former President and Chief Executive Officer
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Richard C. Levin

Trustee Emeritus, JSTOR
President
Yale University

Cathleen Morawetz

Founding Trustee Emeritus, JSTOR
Professor Emeritus
New York University

Dr. James Carmichael Renick

Founding Trustee Emeritus, JSTOR
Chancellor
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
Greensboro, NC

Gilbert R. Whitaker, Jr.

Founding Trustee Emeritus, JSTOR
Dean and Professor of Business Economics
Rice University

R. Elton White

Founding Trustee Emeritus, JSTOR
Former President
NCR Corporation

JSTOR: Guarding the Back Door to the Palace of Wisdom since August, 1995, with an able assist from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 2004 990-PF.

From reality to rhetoric

It's been some years since I last spoke with JSTOR's Bruce Heterick. Today from him I learned of a kind of change in JSTOR's degree of openness, or closure:

JSTOR–Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving “Unaffiliated” Users

Nearly 500,000 articles in more than 200 journals are now freely available on JSTOR

The press release from JSTOR's Laura Brown begins:

I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.

The release goes on to spell out details of this alteration and goes out of its way to say that the indictment of Aaron Swartz could have affected the timing and substance of this step, but ultimately did not.

Mr. Heterick concluded his brief email with:

I’m not a big fan of your rhetoric, but in your work as an independent scholar, I thought you’d find this beneficial.

Ok.

Bruce,

I'm not a fan of JSTOR's reality, but such as it is, this is a small step toward acknowledging the factual truth of my argument. Human knowledge, gleaned by humans in taxpayer-funded institutions of higher learning, could even now be freely available in toto to all who seek it. Unfortunately, the desires of craven academic publishing houses to continue to subsist in antiquated form, coupled with the highly lucrative artificial scarcification of academic data thanks to the walled garden stratagem of JSTOR and its imitators, continue to transform this potential reality into a chimaera.

This transformation is the real rhetoric, in all its material voracity. Except that this can now be qualified as, "material voracity after 1922."

Thanks for the update.

Tom

Seeing this made me wonder:

Add JSTOR to Your Facebook

November 13th, 2007 by LOCL

Now you can search the JSTOR database of scholarly journal articles from your Facebook.

To add the JSTOR application follow these easy steps:

1. Search for “JSTOR Search” and select that application from the results.
2. Click on the Add JSTOR Search button.
3. In the application settings, set the Proxy to http://flagship.luc.edu/login?url=
4. Search to your heart’s content.

What if Microsoft were to give JSTOR, say, $15 million to cover open searches through Facebook? Would that not be very nice?

Then I wondered: What if Google were to endow JSTOR with $150 million, or $15 billion, or whathaveyou, to cover open searches for the entire world? Would that not be very nice?

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.

JSTOR to INDIA: Go to FUCK U

A disaster of monumental proportions is brewing in Indian academia. For some years now, Indian universities and research centres have had access to a resource called JSTOR, a site that publishes online editions of a wide range of journal articles in a variety of subjects. The initial phase of this access was paid for very generously by the Ford Foundation, with the understanding that after a stipulated period the UGC would take over responsibility for the funding. JSTOR is hugely important for researchers in India because, as a third world country, we can’t afford to regularly visit hard currency countries and stay there for long periods for research. This is still unavoidable for primary and archival material, but the huge cost of consulting secondary material, subscribing to individual journals whether hard copy or online, and waiting while they show up in the post is greatly reduced with a resource like JSTOR. There are some downsides: JSTOR doesn’t carry current stuff, and all the articles are a few years old, but this is more of a problem for the social and physical sciences than the humanities.Even for the sciences, they now need only subscribe to a few key journals, and look up the minor ones on JSTOR.

However, this happy state of affairs has come to an end. Some two weeks ago, JSTOR abruptly became inaccessible. When you log on from JU, it still says “Your access is provided by Jadavpur University”, but when you actually try to read anything, you get an “access denied” message. The service is provided to subscribed IP addresses. The reason for this disruption, we are told, is that the entire country has failed to pay its dues.

More here

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.

Withholding knowledge is also power

via INSIDE Higher Ed:

JSTOR -- which until now has been a repository for back issues of nearly 800 journals -- will, beginning in 2011, provide current content from the 50-plus journals that the UC Press publishes, meshing the new releases seamlessly with the journals' back files and primary content from libraries increasingly found on JSTOR. ...

...libraries would buy access to both current and archival journals in a single transaction, though the pricing models would be different. Users would continue to pay for JSTOR's archival material in roughly the same way they do now, paying for collections of journals at prices set by JSTOR, but publishers will set their own prices for the current journals, which while provided through JSTOR will be clearly branded by journal and publisher.

SIGH

"The important issue here is whether or not other publishers will get on board with the UC Press," Steven J. Bell, associate university librarian for research & instructional services at Temple University, said in an e-mail message. "As they say, this agreement could be a 'game changer,' but not if the other publishers don’t buy in to the change."

"Aren't we at a point where we should be moving forward more to integrate monograph with journal content online, rather than allowing this new 'digital divide' to grow even further?" ...

[Oh yes - the digital divide.]

"It would be a natural extension of this platform to have that content. Eventually, it won't matter what the traditional carrier was -- it will be 'content,' in a variety of presentations, that represents the whole scope of the research endeavor."

JSTOR's method of digitally packaging academic knowledge seems to be maturing into a richer model. What's unclear is why the expansion of "content" is not yet matched by similar efforts to broaden audience access. Why not set as a goal the chance for anyone, anywhere to access articles for minimal micropayments? Or is that not within "the whole scope of the research endeavor." What's the down side of sharing knowledge?

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!

speed bumps

David Weinberger comments here on the preceding post about JSTOR. Meanwhile, having recently read Everything is Miscellaneous, I can't help but think of its relevance to JSTOR, and, conversely, to consider implications of the JSTOR-Y for David's argument/vision.

Toward the end of chapter 1, having described in some detail the Bettmann Archive and contrasted it with Corbis, and both their modes of organization with that of Flickr, David goes on to say:

We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second-order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas and knowledge and put them neatly away.

But now we -- the customers, the employees, anyone -- can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves, and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them.

"Isla: En Mi Carcel de Papel"

Two - uh, three - quick points:

1. The "paper order" of scholarly journals, thanks to the work of JSTOR, is subject to vast abbreviation. Instead of requiring duplicate tons of paper redundantly delivered to and stored in thousands of expensive buildings, one set, well cared for, or two, or at most a very, very few, are all that's required to meet the needs of a readership that, by virtue of the modality of that abbreviation, could now be expanded to include virtually everybody. This is a vast and stunning alteration of the first-order economy.

2. We have a Pisgah view of these journals thanks to Google's crawl. Without that algorithm spidering through 23 million pages, we would still be subject to the rule of paper.

3. We are still subject to the constraints of paper insofar as the business model of JSTOR has a ways to evolve before it can revolutionize its gatekeeping function to allow open access.

It seems that between the prisonhouse of paper and the unfettered bliss of what "we" can do with universal miscellaneity lie some bumps in the road: the event of Google, and the encrustations of first and second order economies, at the very least.

Downshift that Newton Reference Enthusiasm!

JSTOR–Now available at home!

Now you can read JSTOR articles without having to come in to the library–perfect for those late-night research sessions!  We now have remote access to JSTOR.

JSTOR is a collection of over 600 full-text journals across 40 disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

JSTOR* Home Access | In Library Access

Please note:  We are allowed two simultaneous remote users only.

vide infra

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."

love what you've done with your cognitive reduction system

Note to self:

If corporate media and academic JSTOR*izers work to place human experience on a pay-per-view basis, NPR music programming works to ensure that our open range aural worldview consists of mincing pissant bullshit.

*Did you know...

• JSTOR includes 1,856,206 full-length articles across 47 disciplines [that you can't read].
• There are 1,387,437 book reviews in JSTOR.
• The oldest content in the JSTOR archive was published in 1665.
• JSTOR is active in Facebook.

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.

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.

Swartz on Slate

A few bits from a new piece about Aaron Swartz on Slate - 

“Suits,” he wrote on his blog, “are the physical evidence of power distance, the entrenchment of a particular form of inequality.”

On Kafka's Trial: “This isn’t fiction, but documentary.”

College was not an intellectual dream world—it was just another place that needed fixing. “If I wanted to start a more effective university, it would be pretty simple,” he wrote on his third day at Stanford. “Hire the smartest people and accept the smartest students, get them to work on projects that interest them ... organize a bunch of show-and-tells and mixers, and for the most part let them figure stuff out on their own.”

Swartz later acquired his FBI file, which indicated that agents had surveilled his parents’ Highland Park home. That FBI file, Swartz said, was “truly delightful.” At the time, it all seemed funny—the feds getting so upset over something so minor. But Malamud now believes the PACER downloads contributed to the government’s subsequent fervor in prosecuting the JSTOR case. In their eyes, Swartz was a repeat offender, a data vigilante. This was no small thing.

Swartz’s JSTOR scheme was different from his PACER escapade in several crucial ways. First, JSTOR is not a repository of non-copyrightable government documents. Though users with subscription access to JSTOR can grab its contents for free, it is a paid service—major research institutions pony up as much as $50,000 annually for access—that houses journal articles that are mostly under copyright. Second, Swartz wasn’t spurred by an easily identifiable, information-liberating call to action along the lines of Carl Malamud’s PACER push. There was one potential precedent: A couple of years prior, Swartz had collaborated with a Stanford law student named Shireen Barday on a project that involved downloading almost 450,000 articles from the Westlaw database and analyzing them to see who, exactly, was funding legal research. While it’s possible that Swartz was going to post his JSTOR cache on the Web, it’s also plausible that he simply planned to use the articles for research along the lines of the Shireen Barday project. We can’t be sure.

In 2008, Swartz wrote something he called the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto:

Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. 

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal—there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.   

Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. 

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 tickee, no library

The Firestone Lounge?

People often say, "But everything's available online." This is false. As a test, I decided to check out the online availability of the secondary sources in two recent papers of mine (never mind the primary ones in languages like Hittite). In one, on the linguistic and poetic implications of a newly recognized word in Ancient Greek, I cite 65 references: 41 books or chapters in books, not one of which seems to exist in full in virtual form, and 24 articles from 15 different journals, only four of which are on JSTOR or otherwise electronically accessible. And as for the 124 items in the other paper, which cites almost entirely different things in the course of solving a longstanding problem of Indo-European verbal morphology, all 86 books are absent from cyberspace, and only five of the 38 articles (from 22 different journals) can be read electronically. dailyprincetonian.com

In my conversation with Bruce Heterick, Director of JSTOR's Library Relations, he'd noted the possibility that JSTOR could pave the way for more Starbuckses where library stacks used to be. If the Firestone becomes a lounge, c'est la vie princetonienne. More materially in ways we have yet to see, just as USia has fallen behind Korea, Iceland and Belgium (see Table 1) in broadband access and services, the movement to expand the available sources of information and knowledge is also in danger of being stalled. Once again, the corporate appropriative handling of intellectual property in USia -- the system now in place, the system inhabiting our understanding, our legal system, our libraries and academies and "fourth estate" entities as well as the public access to government documents -- is jeopardizing the development of an open society of online resources and therefore access to human knowledge.

Already in certain fields, as noted above, JSTOR's resources are a minor blip -- even so, relatively few of us are able to agree that any of the JSTOR articles Prof. Katz is talking about "can be read electronically."

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. ???

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