5 ms·

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

by 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
      Wikipedia is full of general purpose knowledge and paid for by donations. Even if you never make use of 99.99% of the knowledge it has, there is something for you, and a reason for you to donate. Academic journals are full of incredibly specific knowledge. While some of it is accessible to people with a moderate amount of intelligence/diligence, any journal whose name isn't "Science" is designed for and by an incredibly small group of individuals with an incredibly specific knowledge base. Where is the donor base for that? Answer: Universities are the only plausible donors. And they seem to think maintaining their place of privilege in being able to access the articles is worth some extra bucks.
      - lotu 15y ago
        We have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these services than they would be for an academic journal hosting. If you didn't want to go the centralized method a small journal with under 1,000 readers (>10MB per month per user) could probably host buy hosting for under $100/year. Something that small would be easy to cover out of pocket or via donations
        sycren 15y ago
        services like youtube and flickr have adverts corresponding to a user's tastes and the particular media. How would you suppose doing that with scientific journals?
        jcarreiro 15y ago
        > We have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these Don't be so sure. Some experiments can produce large data sets, which ideally should be made available alongside the published paper.
        Goladus 15y ago
        Well, for most of the JSTOR documents that's probably not the case. But yes sharing with large academic datasets is a real and only partially solved (IOW not solved at all) problem.
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    Which shunts the cost onto the taxpayers. A lot less cost than the current cost of paying subscriptions to that same content.
- thirdstation 15y ago
  There are a fair number of studies exploring the usage of P2P distribution of scholarly articles. One issue that would need to be satisfactorily (and simply) dealt with is trust that the copy you have is the authoritative copy of record.
  - bricestacey 15y ago
    LOCKSS[1] (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) has an algorithm that does its best to ensure you have a real copy and that no one can poison the network. [1] http://www.lockss.org/ http://www.lockss.org/
  - rmc 15y ago
    Simple, bittorrent has inbuilt hashing mechanism. Just host the .torrent file on your own server. Hosting a 20KiB file is cheap as chips.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    This torrent in particular has that covered: he included an hash of the hashes file in the message, which is signed with his PGP key.
syedkarim 15y 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.
crocowhile 15y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier) make billions by publishing mainly work payed with tax payer money.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  They may have to pay the publisher to host them on their server. Not in this case, apparently; they're public domain. Although JSTOR did foot the bill for the scanning. I'll take your other point, though: if there's real evil in the academic publishing world, it's Elsevier.
  - bhickey 15y ago
    Good thing that reproducing something, no matter how laborious the process, is not considered a creative act in the US.
    - pyre 15y ago
      No, but (IIRC) compilations that take serious effort to produce have a copyright on them, e.g. the phone book.
      - ahlatimer 15y ago
        The content doesn't, actually. I'll look up the specific case when I get home, but phone book publishers most definitely do not have any copyright claims to the phone number or addresses. They do have copyright claims to the font choice, layout, etc., so you can't copy the phone book wholesale, but you can take the phone numbers, rearrange them, and set them in a different typeface and you'd be in the clear. I don't believe there's any part of copyright that takes the amount of effort into account. There was a case (again, I'll look it up when I get home) where a copy of a work that was in the public domain was granted its own copyright because it had a few errors in it. The errors were unintentional, but copyright was given. In the phone book case, the court specifically mentioned that even though there was no doubt a significant amount of work required to produce the phone book, that didn't give the publisher copyright.

by pnathan 15y ago

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
    Wikipedia is full of general purpose knowledge and paid for by donations. Even if you never make use of 99.99% of the knowledge it has, there is something for you, and a reason for you to donate. Academic journals are full of incredibly specific knowledge. While some of it is accessible to people with a moderate amount of intelligence/diligence, any journal whose name isn't "Science" is designed for and by an incredibly small group of individuals with an incredibly specific knowledge base. Where is the donor base for that? Answer: Universities are the only plausible donors. And they seem to think maintaining their place of privilege in being able to access the articles is worth some extra bucks.
    - lotu 15y ago
      We have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these services than they would be for an academic journal hosting. If you didn't want to go the centralized method a small journal with under 1,000 readers (>10MB per month per user) could probably host buy hosting for under $100/year. Something that small would be easy to cover out of pocket or via donations
      - sycren 15y ago
        services like youtube and flickr have adverts corresponding to a user's tastes and the particular media. How would you suppose doing that with scientific journals?
      - jcarreiro 15y ago
        > We have services like youtube and Flicker that provide hosting for movies and pictures for free. The data requirements are far greater for these Don't be so sure. Some experiments can produce large data sets, which ideally should be made available alongside the published paper.
        Goladus 15y ago
        Well, for most of the JSTOR documents that's probably not the case. But yes sharing with large academic datasets is a real and only partially solved (IOW not solved at all) problem.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  Which shunts the cost onto the taxpayers. A lot less cost than the current cost of paying subscriptions to that same content.
thirdstation 15y ago
There are a fair number of studies exploring the usage of P2P distribution of scholarly articles. One issue that would need to be satisfactorily (and simply) dealt with is trust that the copy you have is the authoritative copy of record.
- bricestacey 15y ago
  LOCKSS[1] (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) has an algorithm that does its best to ensure you have a real copy and that no one can poison the network. [1] http://www.lockss.org/ http://www.lockss.org/
- rmc 15y ago
  Simple, bittorrent has inbuilt hashing mechanism. Just host the .torrent file on your own server. Hosting a 20KiB file is cheap as chips.
- icebraining 15y ago
  This torrent in particular has that covered: he included an hash of the hashes file in the message, which is signed with his PGP key.

syedkarim 15y 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.

crocowhile 15y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier) make billions by publishing mainly work payed with tax payer money.

Vivtek 15y ago
They may have to pay the publisher to host them on their server. Not in this case, apparently; they're public domain. Although JSTOR did foot the bill for the scanning. I'll take your other point, though: if there's real evil in the academic publishing world, it's Elsevier.
- bhickey 15y ago
  Good thing that reproducing something, no matter how laborious the process, is not considered a creative act in the US.
  - pyre 15y ago
    No, but (IIRC) compilations that take serious effort to produce have a copyright on them, e.g. the phone book.
    - ahlatimer 15y ago
      The content doesn't, actually. I'll look up the specific case when I get home, but phone book publishers most definitely do not have any copyright claims to the phone number or addresses. They do have copyright claims to the font choice, layout, etc., so you can't copy the phone book wholesale, but you can take the phone numbers, rearrange them, and set them in a different typeface and you'd be in the clear. I don't believe there's any part of copyright that takes the amount of effort into account. There was a case (again, I'll look it up when I get home) where a copy of a work that was in the public domain was granted its own copyright because it had a few errors in it. The errors were unintentional, but copyright was given. In the phone book case, the court specifically mentioned that even though there was no doubt a significant amount of work required to produce the phone book, that didn't give the publisher copyright.