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JSTOR 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
by foldr 2mo ago
JSTOR 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).
- DANmode 2mo agoOkay, so why can’t the volunteers scanning for Anna’s Archive perform this again? Why does it need to be technically centralized and politically weak?
- foldr 2mo agoAnna's Archive is primarily a meta search engine. I see that they've put out a call for volunteers, but I don't think any significant part of their archive consists of volunteer scans. As to your 'why' question, we're talking about boring, thankless work that in many cases breaks the law. It's not exactly surprising that we don't see millions of people signing up to do it for free! I don't understand your second paragraph.
- DANmode 2mo agoI simply don’t see JSTOR outlasting (as an organization, or a technology/archive) individual contributors and torrent trackers. Solution which does not require millions of people =]
- DANmode 2mo ago> JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives So does SciHub.
- foldr 2mo agoSciHub mainly redistributes scans of print archives made by JSTOR and other organisations. And it does not have everything that JSTOR has. For example, this paper is not, as far as I can tell, available on SciHub: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178697 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178697 Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place: https://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-and-apex-covantage-mark-20-years-bringing-academic-research-online/ https://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-and-apex-covantage-mark-2...
- DANmode 2mo agoAre you being intentionally obtuse? If the JSTOR copy didn’t exist, the pre-print copy would be scraped from the author’s website, or the text / results submitted by the author or someone close anonymously. Less, more slowly, but the same point.
- foldr 2mo agoSure, we’ll scrape journal articles from the 1950s from the authors’ websites... Many more recent articles also aren’t available on the authors’ websites, such as the one I linked.