33GB of public domain JSTOR articles, and a manifesto

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro

by sp332 • 15 years ago

840 153 15 years ago

sp3324• 15 years ago

Jason Scott of textfiles.com has the whole archive downloaded here, if you want to browse the metadata before downloading the files. http://cdmirror.textfiles.com/JSTOR_01_PhilTrans/

a3_nm• 15 years ago

404 now, I wonder why.

pw• 15 years ago

That link gives a 404 :-(

sp3324• 15 years ago

Apologies to Jason for posting a link to his temp/staging folder. The files will be available at the Internet Archive soon.

showerst• 15 years ago

Just to be clear, these are apparently unrelated to the Aaronsw case, right?

mbreese• 15 years ago

From the "manifesto":

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

Andrew_Quentin3• 15 years ago

Yet he does not mention what the boring and lawful means are. Perhaps he is too bussy of a man to spend his time educating us.

iterationx• 15 years ago

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.

- ---- Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011 gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

slowpoke2• 15 years ago

I truly think you are a brave person for doing this under your real name. I most likely couldn't do that.

Godspeed, good sir.

ck2• 15 years ago

So what percentage is that? Is a "page" still the 2k standard these days?

per wikipedia as of November 2, 2010, the database contained 1,289 journal titles in 20 collections representing 53 disciplines, and 303,294 individual journal issues, totaling over 38 million pages of text

sp3324• 15 years ago

Very little. The indictment against aaronsw claims that he got over 4 million documents, and this archive only has 18,500. And I'm not even sure what percentage of the total aaronsw got.

ynniv• 15 years ago

Percentage of what? This is not Aaronsw but someone inspired by his actions.

_delirium5• 15 years ago

This is only the back issues of one journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It's very significant historically, but far from all of JSTOR's public-domain holdings.

rb2k_2• 15 years ago

And for people interested in how many bitcoins donations flow his way:

http://blockexplorer.com/address/14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2...

VMG• 15 years ago

Nothing?

r00fus• 15 years ago

I imagine it's a legal defense fund of sorts. It's not like he owns these documents.

rb2k_2• 15 years ago

Check again :)

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

Can anyone explain why all these documents are not available for free? Why does the only place you can download them charge for the privilege?

jcarreiro3• 15 years ago

> Why does the only place you can download them charge for the privilege?

Because they can.

_delirium5• 15 years ago

True, but JSTOR is supposed to be a non-profit initiative in the service of scholarship, not a revenue-maximizing corporation. It's largely funded by taxpayer money. I agree they need funding to continue their work, and some of that comes from building up an internal revenue stream so they aren't completely dependent on the winds of year-to-year grants. But I've been disappointed overall by their lack of any commitment to make more things publicly available, given their charitable mission.

When JSTOR was first getting off the ground 15 years ago, many of us had higher hopes for the organization's direction, that it'd eventually be a mixture of subscription-only access for recent non-open-access journals, and free-to-anyone digitization of old, public-domain materials, like a large-scale version of Project Perseus. But nobody at JSTOR really pushed the 2nd part; they digitized old documents, but kept them all subscription-only, and never even developed plans (despite occasional agitation) for individuals to buy subscription access for any sort of reasonable price. They seem to have developed a bit of an unhealthy attachment to "owning" the JSTOR archive as their valuable crown jewel, despite officially just being custodians of it on behalf of the academic community.

pnathan3• 15 years ago

Well, there is a non-zero cost to hosting and delivering documents, as well as creating the infrastructure to allow it.

Those costs must be made up somehow in the business model.

(before I get flamed, I'm not arguing that all documents should be $19 per article. I'm just saying that there's a non-zero cost that needs to be passed on to the customers somehow).

hack_edu2• 15 years ago

> Well, there is a non-zero cost to hosting and delivering documents, as well as creating the infrastructure to allow it

Sounds like a perfect job for bittorrent distribution....

syedkarim• 15 years ago

Yes, it's non-zero. But for many, many organizations and many individuals, the non-zero is pretty much zero. The Internet Archive, for example, could absorb something like this without even blinking. As could Google Books.

crocowhile4• 15 years ago

Also, JSTOR does NOT get those documents for free. They may have to pay the publisher to host them on their server.

Academic publishing is a bitch and there is a lot going on lately towards a common, world wide reform. However, JSTOR is not really the bad guy here. Other publishers (e.g. Elsevier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier) make billions by publishing mainly work payed with tax payer money.

tcb23• 15 years ago

As others have said, the costs of distribution are non-trivial, and are almost certainly a loss for JSTOR on these articles. For example the exemplary arxiv.org, which provides a relatively 'simple' hosting service and where the author prepares the full manuscript- they still have annual running costs in the region of $500,000. Even arxiv.org do not seem to have found it easy to secure funding from other universities and institutions which surely find it essential (most costs are borne by Cornell library).

While there is great value in the JSTOR articles (all published before 1923)- in reality very few active researchers will be reading them. Some of the research will be just plain wrong, some corrected or superseded, and if there is any useful stuff left, then it will be readily found in much more modern and useful presentations.

I think the more important battle is to ensure all current research is deposited in open archives (preferably something like arxiv.org). The historical stuff will surely follow...

sciurus• 15 years ago

If anyone is curious where the money to run arXiv goes, here is their 2010 budget and their business plan.

http://arxiv.org/help/support/2010_budget http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper

ivankirigin2• 15 years ago

Scribd should index and host these. I doubt that would greatly add to their current huge scale. They could make a dedicated site for it. They could also probably get the help of the FOSS community to help make the search faster.

18pfsmt• 15 years ago

EDIT: I should delete this because it is wrong, but I won't so as not to confuse the reply.

Thanks, gwern. Sorry for not RTFA first, but I've adopted a habit of reading comments first.

--- I believe these documents are still under copyright, so that would give them significant liability. They exist as a DMCA compliant company, so they are protected from their users' actions; but, pro-actively doing what you suggest would remove the DMCA protections.

gwern4• 15 years ago

> The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

> The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

gwern4• 15 years ago

So, the solution to one publisher locking up and charging for access to public domain material is... copying the material to another publisher that likes locking up and charging for access?

ivankirigin2• 15 years ago

It is a solution to needing to download every file here just to access one quickly. Scribd has charged document creators IIRC, not readers.

Scribd makes money off ads, so the incentives are actually really well aligned

mestudent• 15 years ago

Is this[1] the "manifesto"?

If not can someone post it so I don't have to get around the block.

[1] http://cdmirror.textfiles.com/JSTOR_01_PhilTrans/1st_READ.tx...

pimeys• 15 years ago

The same one that is in the pirate bay page.

equark2• 15 years ago

I don't fully understand the logic. Even if the underlying content is free, how are JSTOR scans public domain? If Google spends millions of dollars scanning in public domain books, I don't see how that gives Bing the right to download them all from Google unless given permission.

It also seems we all benefit from allowing companies to invest in scanning public domain works since for whatever reason nobody is doing this by hand now.

meow2• 15 years ago

I think the title is kind of wrong. The torrent author says: "I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works."

So he clearly says its not in public domain but from a moral point of view they should be available to all the masses. The description of the torrent is very interesting. Definitely worth taking a look even if not willing to download the actual torrent.

microarchitect• 15 years ago

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

I think this statement means that the documents are indeed in the public domain.

I also think equark makes a valid point about the scans. Further, I don't understand why these guys are going after JSTOR, a non-profit organization. I'd be more understanding of their methods if they went after somebody like Elsevier.

bryanlarsen• 15 years ago

You missed the word "unjust" in your reading. He very clearly claims elsewhere in his manifesto that the documents are public domain. The statement you elided would then be in conflict with that, but only if you remove the word "unjust".

skizm• 15 years ago

Maybe I have misread but I believe he is saying that the scanning costs are negligible compared to what they are charging/making. He mentions that when the journals were in paper that the publishers charged just enough to keep their printing up and running but now they are getting greedy and making enough money to have political clout.

Bottom line is that people shouldn't make so much money off the back of unpaid academics/scholars. Personally I feel like if they charged something like 99 cents for a DRM free version of each paper (with free abstracts still of course) this might be more reasonable.

Just my take though :)

Palomides• 15 years ago

At least in the US, it seems the courts have decided that faithful reproductions of 2D art that is in the public domain themselves are not copyrightable. I suspect this could apply here.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...

_delirium5• 15 years ago

Scans of public-domain work remain in the public domain under U.S. law, at least as currently interpreted. There's no Supreme Court decision on the subject, but the leading case widely followed is Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel (1999) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...)

Access to network resources is another matter--- Bing might be violating Google's access policies if they slurped Google Books, especially if they evaded rate limits or ignored robots.txt. But they wouldn't be in violation of any copyrights. This makes it a bit of a cat-out-of-the-bag situation. If I download a copy of an 1878 journal from JSTOR, and email it to a friend, I'm violating JSTOR's terms of service. But if my friend turns around and posts the PDF online, he is not breaking any laws.

A similar situation holds with U.S. government classified documents. Whoever leaked the Pentagon Papers broke the law, and could be prosecuted for the leak. But once they were out, as public-domain government documents, it was not illegal for third parties to republish them.

jcarreiro3• 15 years ago

The works are in the public domain. Unless you think that simply scanning and producing a bit-for-bit accurate copy of a work in the public domain produces a new work that deserves copyright protection?

nullc8• 15 years ago

You appear to be advancing a sweat of the brow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow) theory of copyright— a view which is rejected by US law (the law in other places may be different). See Bridgeman v. Corel for an excellent example.

Of course, I don't begrudge people who scan the ability to get paid for their work. But there are a great many ways to get paid which do not involve forever robbing from the public domain (because, of course, if they are able they will simply keep updating their scanned copies while locking the public away from the originals).

equark2• 15 years ago

Very interesting. That's exactly what I was arguing.

I don't quite understand where the line is though. For instance, why isn't Google Map information public domain? The locations of roads aren't copyrighted and Google's efforts to enter this information don't seem that different than compiling a phonebook.

wnight2• 15 years ago

Anyone has the right to download anything from anyone else. It's the content-provider's server and it's their job to tell it who it should and shouldn't give content to. Making content accessible is implicitly giving permission to download it. It's how the internet works, by design.

aidenn0• 15 years ago

FYI it's potentially NSFW if you don't have adblock

sp3324• 15 years ago

D'oh, I always forget about those ads because I have adblock. blushes

emilis_info3• 15 years ago

Facebook won't let me post a link to this torrent. Anyone know a way around?

URL shorteners don't help.

davorak• 15 years ago

I was unaware of that level of censorship at Facebook. Where are you trying to post it.

emilis_info3• 15 years ago

I am trying to post a link to the PirateBay page in my personal news feed.

I get a message about abusive content.

andresmh• 15 years ago

Me too. I even tried to share a link to http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5023425/Holy_Bible%28s%29_-_... but it was denied

mathew1988• 15 years ago

Facebook even censors pirate bay links within private messages between you and friends iirc. They don't block select other torrent sites though. They're a bit odd like that.

Some more info http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay-links...

rdkls• 15 years ago

Looks like FB blocks links to torrent detail pages on TPB. Best I could do was post a link to things tagged with JSTOR (there's only one): http://thepiratebay.org/tag/JSTOR

alanh2• 15 years ago

Well, a manual level if indirection would solve it — publish a web page with a little more than a link to the Pirate Bay page; and post a link to that page, on Facebook. If you use Simplenote’s published page feature or Dropbox’s public folder, this can take but a minute.

emilis_info3• 15 years ago

I created a simple page with a single frame in it containing the TPB page. This did the job.

Didn't want to write any blog posts about it, just point people to the original page.

aristus• 15 years ago

Looking into it. That domain is not blocked. It is possible to post links to the root domain, just not deep links. It could be a bug or misconfiguration on their side. FB does a ping to posted links to grab the title, thumbnail, etc. That seems to be failing for deeplinks to TPB.

jfriedly• 15 years ago

I believe FB blocks links to TPB. They actually changed my password and sent me an email saying that they thought my account had been compromised when I tried to do it once. However, as alanh said, a little redirection will work to post it.

Edit: Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090507/1152134782.shtml

cpach• 15 years ago

Something like this maybe?

http://www.google.com/search?q=577d58aa66beaceb71518ec417ab3...

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

Post it on twitter, then post a link to your tweet on facebook.

wacker_t• 15 years ago

take a try with this copy-paste-tool:

http://www.clicktoapp.com

m0wfo• 15 years ago

Only just realised Eircom has blocked access to TPB in Ireland at the request of the 4 major record labels. The fact that this HN post is tangential to the issue of music piracy annoys me. Another step closer to censorship.

zeratul2• 15 years ago

Medical doctors were very unhappy to pay for research papers that were funded by tax paying Americans. That's why since April 2008 all articles funded by NIH have to be freely available: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ . Remember, it's impossible for law to work backwards.

cbr• 15 years ago

> Remember, it's impossible for law to work backwards.

Really? I think it's just politically less convenient than making laws that apply to future research. There's nothing that would keep the government from removing copyright all together if they wanted to.

alanh2• 15 years ago

I am also quibbling with your claim “it's impossible for law to work backwards.” (IANAL)

1) It is unconstitutional to prosecute an individual for a crime that was legal at time of perpetration.

2) However, the opposite — decriminalizing previously illegal behavior — can be retroactive.

3) Changing future interpretation of copyright, etc., isn’t the same as case #1. If I’m not mistaken, Congress has passed e.g. the Mickey Mouse copyright law and the DMCA, which both extended “protection” & duration of copyright on previously created works.

nullc8• 15 years ago

Maybe.

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/golan-v-holder/

MostAwesomeDude• 15 years ago

You are mistaken on retroactive copyright; publishers and artists who failed to secure copyrights the first time around did not get retroactive postmortem copyright granted to them. The classic example is the library of H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories are considered public domain as there is nobody who has a reasonable claim of copyright to them.

praeclarum• 15 years ago

Retroactive laws are common place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law

zeratul2• 15 years ago

I didn't know that. I was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullum_crimen,_nulla_poena_sine... . Obviously, history shows that governments can do whatever they want if opportunity arises.

giberson• 15 years ago

If I weren't too timid to risk doing so, I would do the following (read I hope someone else does this).

Process the pdf's with an OCR program to extract as much text from each document as possible. The extraction should be done page by page, so the extracted text can be referenced to a PDF page#.

Then, provide a searchable/browse-able directory of the extracted content. Each page of text has link to the original PDF page so you can easily open up the PDF to the page the text was extracted from.

I'd also make all text user editable wiki style. Combined with the inline PDF page references it would be super easy for any user to fix up translation errors from the OCR process. Tie in a karma system to the users profile so that edits can be thanked/kudos on a job well done to help with automating moderation of user edits by rating the user's current karma to decide if the edit should be accepted automatically or provided as an alternate version other users can check and rate up if they think it should replace current version.

Maybe mash in an image cropping service so diagrams can be cropped from the PDF and inserted inline with the translated text. Provide simple wiki formatting markup to allow users to format the articles.

Use ad revenue/donations to alleviate/cover hosting costs.

1, 2, 3, go.

crocowhile4• 15 years ago

That is what jstor is about actually: full text search of a number of articles.

brettnak• 15 years ago

I haven't used it seriously in quite a while, but I remember the search being fairly primitive, though faceted.

drewda• 15 years ago

DocumentCloud [1] provides all the pieces necessary. It's all very nicely documented, too.

[1] http://www.documentcloud.org

ristretto4• 15 years ago

Regarding this, since the archives are in the public domain, wouldn't it be possible for any third party (e.g. google books) to ask and obtain permission to photograph the originals ?

Anyway the ethical thing to do here is to lobby jstor (a non-profit organization) to make reprints free.

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

Well, most of this already exists in Google books, where I'm reading some of these particular scientific journals right now, can switch to OCRed text at any time (albeit with ftrange contemporarie fpelling), or download a facsimile of any public domain work in PDF format. The only thing they don't have in place (and should add) is the wiki-style crowd editing.

So the guy has basically built a 33gb torrent of stuff that was already freely available to the public, just from a different source.

prosody• 15 years ago

There's already a system somewhat like that in place and it was actually referenced in the article. Wikisource (http://wikisource.org) is run by the same nonprofit as Wikipedia, and has a pretty robust system for pairing up side by side transcribed texts and scans. Someone's already started the germ of a Phil. Trans. library (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Philosophical_Transactions). At present the first volume is done and about forty volumes (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Philosophical_Transactio...) are uploaded and ready for users to transcribe.

mkrecny• 15 years ago

I used OCR to do some interesting things with a similar dataset:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791611

bnewbold• 15 years ago

If you're curious about what these papers are, here is a hack at exposing the metadata in an easily searchable format. It would not be hard to scrape the PDFs to searchable text using unix tools (doesn't come out very readable) and render them as SVG files with inkscape for easy browser viewing:

http://robocracy.org/royal-search/

https://github.com/bnewbold/royal-search

Lots of good old stuff, such as "On the Double Organs of Generation of the Lamprey, the Conger Eel, the Common Eel, the Barnacle, and Earth Worm, Which Impregnate Themselves; Though the Last from Copulating, Appear Mutually to Impregnate One Another"

This is all available elsewhere, i'm just trying to demonstrate how low the barrier to search is with OSS tools; I hope all these papers end up on archive.org with full text search!

dunham• 15 years ago

Distributed Proofreaders already has some infrastructure set up for proofreading and editing OCR'd documents. It's not quite the same as your proposal, but they do track stats and have levels of participants based on skill and experience. Might be worth checking out.

   http://www.pgdp.net/c/

blinkingled• 15 years ago

So is it legal to (re-)distribute those files? Or are we going to see more prosecutions AA style involving distributors as well as downloaders?

Atropos• 15 years ago

How many different paywalls are there and how many articles are trapped? I'm able to access 5 different databases + one of the biggest research libraries in my state and there are still often articles that are simply inacessible. Or even more ridiculous: Single chapters of a book sometimes cost up to $ 20 online, even if the complete book could be bought for $ 30...

In my mind an easier way to disrupt this system would be to create a p2p site for article sharing - this often takes place informally anyway. Just a place where you could ask "Does anyone have article..." and then a friendly person would upload it to some filehoster and shares the link.

eykanal• 15 years ago

For those of you who aren't familiar, there is an intitution that was set up not long ago call the Public Library of Science (PLoS):

http://www.plos.org/

They have free journals in numerous fields, and gradually more big-name authors (in my field, neuroscience, at least) have been publishing in it. Its worth checking out.

ristretto4• 15 years ago

There's also Frontiers http://frontiersin.org . The problem is how to convince scientists to use them.

juberpatel• 15 years ago

Actually, the operation of PLoS journals raises an interesting question. These journals charge the researchers for publishing papers so that these papers are freely accessible to anyone. But the charges are in the range of $2200 - $3000 per paper! Doesn't that mean the traditional journals are charging reasonable fees to the readers?

apas• 15 years ago

That's why I love the Pirate Bay and its community.

Free art, technology and culture. Yep, this is the internet.

y0ghur7_xxx• 15 years ago

Link to manifesto http://pastebin.com/KudE4bWr for people who don't have access to the pirate bay.

username32• 15 years ago

What's so good about these articles?

slowpoke2• 15 years ago

What's bad about more knowledge?

username32• 15 years ago

I'm not saying it's bad. I'm curious what's special or interesting about these documents.

sitkack• 15 years ago

Please seed. If you are on a mac you can use transmissionbt.

http://www.transmissionbt.com/

Configure the bandwidth management to acceptable always on background levels and minimize to the dock or put on a different desktop with spaces.

aridiculous• 15 years ago

I wonder what would happen if this happened to Westlaw, one of the 2-3 industry standards for law firms. Incredibly expensive.

The irony alone in the law profession would be tremendous. It'd be interesting to see if law firms would illegally access it: It would be obvious they were if they previously only subscribed to Westlaw, but the reality is most law firms subscribe to more than one database for emergency backup.

gwern4• 15 years ago

Ironically, one of Aaron's previous projects was about legal files: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PACER_%28law%...

rdp• 15 years ago

State and federal court opinions are freely available from the courts themselves. Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc. gain much of their value from tools they provide for analyzing the opinions. These companies manually produce headnotes, case histories, and citation history (i.e., "shepardization"). Collating this value-added data would be vastly more difficult than automatically pulling opinions out of the PACER database (or even JSTOR). Not that I wouldn't like to see somebody try it . . .

dbingham• 15 years ago

Someone I know is suggesting that these documents were already free and available on the web. I don't really know, since I haven't (and don't have the bandwidth to, really) downloaded the torrent and cross referenced. Here are the links he's provided:

"Unavailable anywhere else? Here's the ones from the 1600s: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/ilej/pbrowse.pl?item=ti... . Here's the ones from 1832-1938: http://catalogue.bnf.fr/servlet/RechercheEquation;jsession... . They're pretty widely available, for free."

"Looks like a bunch are on archive.org, too: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Royal...

Can anyone confirm that these are the same articles in the torrent?

nullc8• 15 years ago

None of your links are working for me.

The only things in archive.org right now appear to be a half dozen issues from the mid-1800s.

nullc8• 15 years ago

It's perhaps easier to go the other way.

Can you find this online? "Description of the Brain of Mr. Charles Babbage"

T1 - Description of the Brain of Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S JF - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character (1896-1934) VL - 200 SP - 117 EP - 131 PY - 1909/01/01/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1909.0003 M3 - doi:10.1098/rstb.1909.0003 AU - Horsley, V.

raldi• 15 years ago

That'll teach 'em. Maybe next time JSTOR will think twice before protecting their network from an apparent DoS attack.

wnight2• 15 years ago

Yeah, because someone downloading documents, at the rate supplied by your server(!), is obviously an attacker.

For what it's worth, it would have been obvious they weren't facing a DoS.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

When is someone going to do this for the ACM's journals?

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

This looks like another case of the "Streisand effect".

nl• 15 years ago

That is one gutsy move by Greg Maxwell.

flocial• 15 years ago

This illustrates the sad state of affairs. The technology is there to distribute this equitably (using torrents). Scanning these documents is a non-trivial task and most people would only need a handful of the papers in this collection for anything but intellectual curiosity. However, the pricing and legal restrictions put in place for the distribution goes against the history of scholarship. The only reason we have lots of ancient works of prose and scholarship is because monasteries of various creeds institutionally copied these works (by hand).

tylerneylon• 15 years ago

[[TL;DR for this comment - Publishers are taking advantage of a prisoner's dilemma / competitive closed market to monetize the near-zero value they supply.]]

Professors don't get much money from direct publication -- in fact, many conferences charge the professors who provide the content. They get paid by grants and their schools. Professors don't want their research to reach a limited audience. The universities doesn't want this either.

The only people in the chain who want limited access are the publishers, since this is how they make money. But between researchers, universities, grants, and publishers, the publishers contribute the least value by far. They generally rely entirely on other professors to edit their journals and conference proceedings, and for all the content. They charge ridiculous rates - often thousands of dollars for a single annual journal subscription - and get away with it because the system is not prone to change. Researchers are rewarded for publishing in "the best" journals, so no one wants to take the leap to publishing in a free space where there is currently much less prestige.

That's basically why academic publishing is messed up. Because there's money to made in keeping it messed up, and money to be lost in fixing it. But the ones who generate the real value _do_ want things to be as freely available as possible. If a critical mass of top-tier researchers agreed to stop publishing in non-free journals and conferences, it would probably start a revolution in this area -- but that's a lot to ask.

It's a prisoner's dilemma, in that the "traitor" researchers who keep publishing in the old journals will be rewarded.

(This is all about academia -- I guess motivations may be different in industry-backed research.)

slowcpu• 15 years ago

Not terribly interesting. Although it is one of the oldest ( if not the oldest ) journals around, it is simply not widely read or terribly important. In addition, from the journal's web site. "All issues back to 2001 are free to access two years after publication."

Now, a collection of all of Nature's issues would have been fascinating.

danbmil99• 15 years ago

Can someone explain who exactly is so hellbent on prosecuting Aaronsw? Who's eye did he poke? JSTOR isn't even pressing charges, so I assume it's some other party.

33GB of public domain JSTOR articles, and a manifesto

Related Stories