From the outside, JSTOR looks "as bad" as the other academic journal publishers. They really aren't. I'm no fan of the copyright cabals and the continued lock

From the outside, JSTOR looks "as bad" as the other academic journal publishers. They really aren't. I'm no fan of the copyright cabals and the continued locking away of academic publications from public view. JSTOR is a non-profit that charges relatively low fees to academic reusers for work that is not financially particularly valuable (it's mostly humanities stuff; pharmaceutical companies and technology researchers aren't desperate to read back issues of the British Journal of Philosophy of Science), and they are digitising old, obscure and non-English papers. They are providing a very valuable service at a reasonable price for academic libraries. The restrictions being placed on the content is just part of the way that academic publishing works. JSTOR have done a bargain with the publishers and scholarly societies because they believe that getting the content scanned and online is more important than making sure there is complete public access to that content. They are working as best as they can within the constraints of the academic system. If you want to hate on the academic system, the commercial publishers are far more deserving of your ire. The commercial publishers are charging extortionate amounts to academic libraries to sell papers back to the people who wrote them. Eliminate the bigger for-profit journal publishers and you'll force an economic change on all of academic publishers. The whole system is at fault: don't hate the player, hate the game.