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>I want a world where the scientific enterprise grows beyond academia. I want a world where the collective intelligence of humanity can be brought to bear on hu
by Permit 14y ago
>I want a world where the scientific enterprise grows beyond academia. I want a world where the collective intelligence of humanity can be brought to bear on humanity's most important problems. I want a world where the conversation of science is conducted in indexible, searchable, linkable, accessible, and modifiable public media.
As lovely of an idea as that is, someone has to write the backend, design the front-end, scan tens of thousands of documents and provide full-text search for them. Prior to JSTOR, these documents were trapped in university libraries, and you would have no feasible way to access them. I think they share your goals, and any problems you have with their operation is due to external factors (publishers, licensing, etc.).
Simply publishing everything for free is an absolutely sure-fire way to see no new content from JSTOR and a huge setback for the digitization of physical articles. Your proposal is a ridiculous over-simplification.
>Is JSTOR a friend or an enemy of my vision? Three articles every two weeks - sounds like an enemy.
How often do you read JSTOR articles? Personally, I don't power through a math paper in a single day, but maybe you're brilliant.
This limitation is not their fault. You're angry at the wrong people.
- robotresearcher 14y agoThere are nearly 7 billion people in the world. I think between us we can manage to read more than 1.5 papers a week.
- Permit 14y agoPerhaps I was unclear: they're not giving away three articles to the entire world every two weeks, it's three per-person.
- robotresearcher 14y agoAh, sorry for my misunderstanding. A researcher doing a literature review can easily get through fifty papers in a week. Most of them we scan to get the gist and follow up on the references looking for the few things we really need to read properly. This is a key research skill acquired by reading hundreds, eventually thousands, of papers. You get really good at it. And that's just the papers you want to read. For each one of those I might download three based on a promising abstract to find the thing is irrelevant after all. Thus an independent researcher with only public JSTOR access is seriously disadvantaged compared to a subscriber.
- orionblastar 14y agoWasn't the whole thing that they allowed free unrestricted access to the JSTOR database from MIT IP addresses? All Aaron Swartz did was jack into an Ethernet port in a closet that was unlocked in an MIT building, and get an IP address from an unsecured network at MIT, and then wrote some Python scripts to work as a web robot and pull down articles. The web robot did the same thing as any user at MIT could do, read and download papers. So yes it is possible to allow free, unrestricted access, JSTOR just decides to only do that to certain IP ranges. If they allowed that with everyone, Aaron wouldn't have to jack his laptop into an unused open closet to pull articles. In fact there was no real crime committed, other than trespassing at MIT, and MIT didn't press any charges to that effect.
- Permit 14y ago>So yes it is possible to allow free, unrestricted access, JSTOR just decides to only do that to certain IP ranges. If they allowed that with everyone, Aaron wouldn't have to jack his laptop into an unused open closet to pull articles. I'm not talking about hosting or downloading. I'm talking about the digitization of documents and to pay the salaries of their ~200 staff.
- daveoh 14y ago~200 staff? Sounds like an awful lot. And I imagine the front end and backed are kinda done now so after a couple of devs maintaining the system, a sys admin or two, some testers, hr and ceo that leaves ~190 scanning in the documents. Or am I oversimplifying this?
- officemonkey 14y agoNot really. Compare their operating budget with Project Gutenberg.
- paulgb 14y agoProject Gutenburg has two part-time employees. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Literary_Archive_Foundation http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Li...
- jacoblyles 14y ago>"As lovely of an idea as that is, someone has to write the backend, design the front-end, scan tens of thousands of documents and provide full-text search for them." No problem - as all the open-access publications and archives in the world will attest (PLoS, arxiv). Give us the access and get out of our way. You will be amazed at the ingenuity of free people. >"How often do you read JSTOR articles? Personally, I don't power through a math paper in a single day, but maybe you're brilliant." When I was in grad school, I would skim dozens of articles to find a few that I wanted to read deeply. The way that we use open information is qualitatively different than rate-limited information. It's just not the same.
- jacquesm 14y ago> As lovely of an idea as that is, someone has to write the backend, design the front-end, scan tens of thousands of documents and provide full-text search for them. I volunteer, where do I sign up?
- tripzilch 14y agoSilly man. You can't just do anything you like, for free! ;-) Count me in, though (given that it'll actually be about opening access to things that weren't open before).