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Beats me what you're talking about, then. The literal answer to your original question is that people use SciHub and Library Genesis because they're free. But t
by foldr 2mo ago
Beats me what you're talking about, then. The literal answer to your original question is that people use SciHub and Library Genesis because they're free. But they're free because they infringe copyright. Maybe Swartz was opposed to copyright per se or maybe he was trying to make a point about free availability of journal articles associated with publicly funded research. Either way, JSTOR is the wrong target. JSTOR doesn't hold the copyright on those articles. JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access – which is exactly what Swartz seemed to be in favor of.
- DANmode 2mo agoIt’s free AND convenient. Shortening path and timelines to info, innovation, further research. That’s the end of the calculation. The rest is just money-clutching noise.
- DANmode 2mo ago> JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access Just link (or specifically mention) a few things they’ve done that people really appreciate. No need to keep repeating the claim.
- foldr 2mo agoJSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives. That's useful to anyone who wants to read an old journal article without going to a physical library. I used to have to go to the library, dig out the relevant issue of Linguistic Inquiry, and photocopy it. Then in 2015, JSTOR started providing access to the entire scanned Linguistic Inquiry archive, so I could access all of those issues digitally. I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.
- DANmode 2mo agoPublic money does go to the costs of that. That’s where most of the PDFs come from.
- foldr 2mo agoHmm, no. In the case of old print journal archives scanned by JSTOR, it's JSTOR paying the cost of the scanning.
- DANmode 2mo agoAnyone can scan, host, and curate - including one or many peers. We do not need any entity in between researchers and other researchers.
- foldr 2mo agoPractically speaking, no-one is going to scan centuries' worth of historical journal articles for free. And JSTOR isn’t really an entity outside the research community; it’s a non-profit that grew from within it.
- DANmode 2mo agoI think we’re talking past each other mostly because I start to lose value on most research for my topics of interest that are more than two or three decades old, let alone five or six. This may be different for others.
- foldr 2mo agoSo, this discussion started with me saying that: > [JSTOR is] a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access You'd think that would pretty obviously include the vast swathes of material published before the internet and PDF preprints were a thing (and the considerable amount of subsequent research that just never got uploaded to anyone's website, for whatever reason).