7 ms·

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?

jcarreiro 15y ago
> Why does the only place you can download them charge for the privilege? Because they can.
- _delirium 15y 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.
  - baconner 15y ago
    I was on JSTORs side of this argument until I read your comment. If its funded in part by taxpayers then the data they produce ought to be at least in part taxpayer property.
    - shadowfox 15y ago
      A (somewhat controversial) question that came up the last time I was discussing this with someone was whether all JSTOR material should be available on the net. This does mean that American taxpayer funded research is now available to practically everyone in the world. What follows is third hand information and not even directly related to JSTOR. So it could be totally wrong. But I am told that at the moment not all of the journals/articles in all areas are available to universities outside the US. Apparently it is hard to get hold of research related to subjects that the US thinks are not "exportable" because of potential impact on national security. Things like nuclear medicine, areas of chemical engineering etc. The journal publishers act as a point of enforcement in this story.
  - Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
    Yet, as you say, they are nonprofit. Are they therefore actually making any profit? I guess that they are not a public company, therefore unfortunately perhaps we can not have any access to the revenue data to determine whether they are making any profit and how such profit is being used. In that case, most probably the safe bet is to decide that they are making profit. If, however, they are in fact not making any profit because their archiving and maintaining of these documents is paid off by the subscription charges, then this torrent does a disservice to science rather than acting as a liberator. Without that information however I do not think it is easy, or indeed possivble, to rationally decide.
    - cdcarter 15y ago
      Non-profit does not mena that they do not make a profit, it just means that any profits are put back into the organization instead of it's leadership or shareholders.
      - _delirium 15y ago
        Shareholders yes, though there's more gray area on "leadership". There's no law against using the revenue of a nonprofit organization to pay its leadership arbitrarily large salaries, unless it rises to the level where the IRS starts to see it as dirty tricks. I have no idea what JSTOR's are, though (or if that's even public). But I don't suspect they are pocketing the cash. My guess is that their reticence to open things is more of an institutional megalomania of sorts. Sort of what you often find at art museums--- while their official mission is to promote the arts and educate the public, many of their staff are at least as interested in building the prestige/fame/fortune of their institution, which explains why they would have weird policies about reproducing their public-domain artworks.
    - chronometric 15y ago
      Check out http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/ http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your... for a great analysis of JSTOR's general revenue breakdown. The top 13 officers earn over $3 million in salaries. So while they may be a nonprofit, profits do matter to some of them.
pnathan 15y 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_edu 15y 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....
  - pnathan 15y ago
    The key issue with bittorrent is that if no one is seeding, the files are "gone". Further, ISPs like to block/filter it. Of course, a case could be made that university libraries should mirror all public domain digital documents of sufficient interest. Which shunts the cost onto the taxpayers. Regardless, the cost still is non-zero, and someone has to bear it.
    - hack_edu 15y ago
      Providing it as a torrent lower the costs at least. Plus, if they were concerned about infrastructure costs they'd have no problem finding mirrors willing to donate bandwidth.
    - nullc 15y ago
      And yet Wikipedia manages to do so without charging $19/article. :) Even for historic scanned books, e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake,_a_critical_essay_%28Swinburne%29.pdf http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake,_a_crit... Likewise, archive.org does as well. I expect these papers will eventually end up in both these places.
      - rauljara 15y ago
tcb23 15y 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 15y 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/2010_budget http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper
  - _delirium 15y ago
    That's actually insanely frugal--- $381,000 total budget! JSTOR is very reticent about their budget, but from IRS filings it appears their annual revenue is in the ballpark of $55-65 million, with about $8m of that going as payments/revenue-share to publishers, leaving somewhere north of $40m for JSTOR operations. It's hard to say how necessary a budget of that size is, made harder by the fact that they publish absolutely nothing about who they are, what they do with the money, how they plan for it, etc. The only source of financial information is their legally mandated annual IRS filing. There's an attempt to sort some of it out here: http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/ http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...

jcarreiro 15y ago

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

_delirium 15y 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.
- baconner 15y ago
  I was on JSTORs side of this argument until I read your comment. If its funded in part by taxpayers then the data they produce ought to be at least in part taxpayer property.
  - shadowfox 15y ago
    A (somewhat controversial) question that came up the last time I was discussing this with someone was whether all JSTOR material should be available on the net. This does mean that American taxpayer funded research is now available to practically everyone in the world. What follows is third hand information and not even directly related to JSTOR. So it could be totally wrong. But I am told that at the moment not all of the journals/articles in all areas are available to universities outside the US. Apparently it is hard to get hold of research related to subjects that the US thinks are not "exportable" because of potential impact on national security. Things like nuclear medicine, areas of chemical engineering etc. The journal publishers act as a point of enforcement in this story.
- Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
  Yet, as you say, they are nonprofit. Are they therefore actually making any profit? I guess that they are not a public company, therefore unfortunately perhaps we can not have any access to the revenue data to determine whether they are making any profit and how such profit is being used. In that case, most probably the safe bet is to decide that they are making profit. If, however, they are in fact not making any profit because their archiving and maintaining of these documents is paid off by the subscription charges, then this torrent does a disservice to science rather than acting as a liberator. Without that information however I do not think it is easy, or indeed possivble, to rationally decide.
  - cdcarter 15y ago
    Non-profit does not mena that they do not make a profit, it just means that any profits are put back into the organization instead of it's leadership or shareholders.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      Shareholders yes, though there's more gray area on "leadership". There's no law against using the revenue of a nonprofit organization to pay its leadership arbitrarily large salaries, unless it rises to the level where the IRS starts to see it as dirty tricks. I have no idea what JSTOR's are, though (or if that's even public). But I don't suspect they are pocketing the cash. My guess is that their reticence to open things is more of an institutional megalomania of sorts. Sort of what you often find at art museums--- while their official mission is to promote the arts and educate the public, many of their staff are at least as interested in building the prestige/fame/fortune of their institution, which explains why they would have weird policies about reproducing their public-domain artworks.
  - chronometric 15y ago
    Check out http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/ http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your... for a great analysis of JSTOR's general revenue breakdown. The top 13 officers earn over $3 million in salaries. So while they may be a nonprofit, profits do matter to some of them.

pnathan 15y 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_edu 15y 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....
- pnathan 15y ago
  The key issue with bittorrent is that if no one is seeding, the files are "gone". Further, ISPs like to block/filter it. Of course, a case could be made that university libraries should mirror all public domain digital documents of sufficient interest. Which shunts the cost onto the taxpayers. Regardless, the cost still is non-zero, and someone has to bear it.
  - hack_edu 15y ago
    Providing it as a torrent lower the costs at least. Plus, if they were concerned about infrastructure costs they'd have no problem finding mirrors willing to donate bandwidth.
  - nullc 15y ago
    And yet Wikipedia manages to do so without charging $19/article. :) Even for historic scanned books, e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake,_a_critical_essay_%28Swinburne%29.pdf http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake,_a_crit... Likewise, archive.org does as well. I expect these papers will eventually end up in both these places.
    - rauljara 15y ago

tcb23 15y 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 15y 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/2010_budget http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper
- _delirium 15y ago
  That's actually insanely frugal--- $381,000 total budget! JSTOR is very reticent about their budget, but from IRS filings it appears their annual revenue is in the ballpark of $55-65 million, with about $8m of that going as payments/revenue-share to publishers, leaving somewhere north of $40m for JSTOR operations. It's hard to say how necessary a budget of that size is, made harder by the fact that they publish absolutely nothing about who they are, what they do with the money, how they plan for it, etc. The only source of financial information is their legally mandated annual IRS filing. There's an attempt to sort some of it out here: http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/ http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...