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.

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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.]