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Practically 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 co
by foldr 2mo ago
Practically 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 =]
- foldr 2mo agoAt present I don’t see individual contributors making any significant contribution towards scanning old academic journals. Why would this change in the future? There was at least a decade where the technology to enable this existed, and where most older issues of most journals were not available online, and yet the army of volunteer scanners failed to materialize. Now that there is already a non-profit doing this archival work at very high quality and with economies of scale, it seems even less likely that such a volunteer effort will materialize. But if you want to prove me wrong, get off HN and go scan some old journal articles!
- DANmode 2mo agoProbably just going to keep reading the news ones, and if I want to synthesize information from old ones, I’ll query a robot. This is still research we’re talking about, right? Not a first-edition of famous literature?
- foldr 1mo ago'Research' includes subjects such as history, where old documents are important for obvious reasons. Besides such cases, I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history. >I’ll query a robot. Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!
- DANmode 1mo ago> I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history. For certain sciences, 36 years is two lifetimes. Like I said: we’re talking past each other due to our research needs.