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> 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 bittorre
by 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 agoThe 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 agoProviding 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 agoAnd 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 agoWikipedia 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 agoWe 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 agoservices 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 agoWell, 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.
- impendia 15y agoI work at a university. I don't think universities have any vested interest in maintaining their place of privilege. Certainly faculty members don't, with rare exceptions (at least one of which I know about). But I think there is not a lot of interest in changing the system. The people who could change things are not directly affected by the disadvantages of the current system.
- coliveira 15y agoThe issue is, university professors already have access to these papers. They are among the few people that want, need, and can understand the science behind it. It looks like it makes sense that universities are willing to pay for that privilege.
- tokenadult 15y agoThe quality of content on JSTOR is much, much, much higher than on Wikipedia. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Improve_Content_Quality http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Lamest_edit_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Lamest_edit_wars
- Vivtek 15y agoWhich shunts the cost onto the taxpayers. A lot less cost than the current cost of paying subscriptions to that same content.
- thirdstation 15y agoThere 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 agoLOCKSS[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 agoSimple, bittorrent has inbuilt hashing mechanism. Just host the .torrent file on your own server. Hosting a 20KiB file is cheap as chips.
- icebraining 15y agoThis torrent in particular has that covered: he included an hash of the hashes file in the message, which is signed with his PGP key.