7 ms·

Digitizing public domain articles is free now? Like, scanners are free and the people who operate them work for free? Isn't it better for a non-profit entity t

Digitizing public domain articles is free now? Like, scanners are free and the people who operate them work for free? Isn't it better for a non-profit entity to digitize PD articles and make them available to the world at a reasonable price? Or would you prefer a world where JSTOR didn't exist and the only people who had access to most old PD documents where those who lived in major western cities near the biggest libraries?

toomuchtodo 14y ago
How much does Wikipedia charge me to make a copy of an article? What is Wikipedia's annual burn rate?
- andreasvc 14y ago
  There's a difference between volunteer-written Wikipedia articles and JSTOR documents curated by professional scholars; e.g., the latter are acceptable for citations.
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  Wikipedia scans and digitizes old paper articles? In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming.
  - malandrew 14y ago
    Personally, I'd be fine handing over all journal publishing responsibilities to Google. The one great thing that Google has going for it is that many many many of the engineers there came from academia and understand the value of open access to information. I don't care if they run ads while they do so. It would be orders of magnitude better than the status quo.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      I fail to understand how a for-profit corporation that sells your privacy to the $500 billion advertising/media/branding industry is a better steward of this information than a not for profit organization that simply charges a fee for their services.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - tzs 14y ago
      No, let's not do this. We don't need the scientific literature fucked as badly as Google fucked the USENET archives.
      - malandrew 14y ago
        Enlighten me. I'm curious.
        tptacek 14y ago
        Google made a complete hash out of the Usenet archives that they bought from DejaNews; you could literally issue the same search month after month and watch yourself getting progressively fewer and fewer results.
    - duaneb 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure Google imposes the same limitations JSTOR does for public domain stuff. Google and JSTOR are both the status quo for digital copies of public domain stuff.
  - rmc 14y ago
    In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming. Writing an encyclopedia is time consuming, but we did that. Walking & driving all over the world is time consuming, but the OpenStreetMap community has done that. Scanning & digitizing old public domain books is time consuming, but the Project Gutenberg project has done that. What's next?
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    Sir, I've worked on/off with Project Gutenberg for over 12 years (since I was 18). I've mailed thousands of CDs/DVDs full of PG's library to people in thirdwave world countries, and I've also reviewed hundreds of books, on my own time and for no compensation, for their Distributed Proofreaders project (http://www.pgdp.net/c/ http://www.pgdp.net/c/). No, I have not tried to digitize old journals. But I HAVE helped contribute to the digitization and distribution of public domain works. I'm aware of the time and financial resource commitments involved.
- joegaudet 14y ago
  Additionally I am pretty sure Wikipedia's annual burn rate is pretty high... Hence the donation request every year and all..
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    My argument is that Wikipedia has more transparency and a lower burn rate than JSTOR. Also, I would accept the Internet Archive as a feasible repository for the data in question vs JSTOR.
politician 14y ago
If you're really asking what I prefer, then I prefer making documents available gratis perhaps after the cost of digitizing them has been recouped. Some additional charge for the ongoing cost of storage and bandwidth would need to be worked out. However, $19 per article is unreasonable (c.f. Amazon S3 Requestor-Pays buckets $0.12/GiB).
- rayiner 14y ago
  What do we know about JSTOR's cost structure? Is the $19 the result of subsidization within the system? I'd imagine there are a ton of articles on JSTOR which nobody ever reads, the digitization of which is subsidized by that of the popular articles. I'd also imagine that a la carte purchases subsidize subscriptions for universities. Also, the underlying content isn't necessarily free. Most of the popular journals charge subscription fees, and I'd imagine JSTOR doesn't get them all for free.
  - politician 14y ago
    You've raised several points. I grant that a $19 article may represent subsidization in their system, but argue that they have an ethical obligation derived from their position as a steward to make the components of that price transparent. It's my understanding that universities pay significant amounts for site licenses and that general public purchases do not subsidize that access. By perpetuating a watermark or attribution on a public domain work digitized by JSTOR, are we as a society not implicitly granting JSTOR a right on the work which it ought not have? Digitization is a one-time salvage operation. Should we conflate it with copyright through watermarks? Regarding JSTOR, journals, and non-public-domain works -- that is a private property matter. They ought to be able to charge what the market will bear.
    - kanzure 14y ago
      > It's my understanding that universities pay significant amounts for site > licenses and that general public purchases do not subsidize that access. Yeah, I am pretty baffled with how non-institutional users are requested to pay for access, both on JSTOR and other publisher's sites. Surely this is not a large source of income? arXiv (always pointed out as a shining example of something going right) has recently started requesting membership fees to be paid by the top 200 institutional users. Other than that, the public is still able to go to the site and read about dark matter and substring bananas. You know, what probably happened was that when the content was starting to get digitized, the publishers only had users that were accessing from universities. So they charged the universities just like they previously did for subscriptions to the bound book issues. At the time, there was probably no concept of doing any sort of analytics to figure out where downloads were coming from, so they didn't think that maybe they should just allow anyone to download, and then setup a deal with colleges to pay their fair share. I think the arXiv model is worth some more investigation.. (This ignores all the actual truths like, they have to maximize shareholder value, they have to make as much money as possible, their incentives are aligned differently, etc. Instead it is simply focusing on the reason why "individual purchase" is an option that doesn't seem to make sense to non-institutional members like the general public.)
rayiner 14y ago
JSTOR is such a bizarre target to pick. 1) Some of the articles on JSTOR are the product of complete public funding. But many are not. Many are the result of partial or complete university funding. 2) All the work of editing the underlying journals, which is very time consuming, is generally not publicly funded. 3) All of the work of digitizing those journal articles is not free. When Google undertakes to digitize such content, they charge you by selling your privacy to others. JSTOR just asks you to pay a fee for their service. Who is the bad guy here?
- rhizome 14y ago
  It doesn't have to be "complete" public funding. I'm gonna go ahead and guess that many, many of the universities that may have partially funded the research also receive tax dollars. This last part is such a huge issue here, I think. "Well it wasn't very many tax dollars..." Yeah, well let's have our share then. One download of each document that tax dollars helped pay for seems fair to me.
  - mjn 14y ago
    I agree with that, but I'd also say openness mandates should be added to every entity that takes taxpayer funding, including, for example, Lockheed, SpaceX, and just about every pharmaceutical company.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Works for me.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Overall, university research is about 50/50 split between public dollars and private dollars. Coincidentally, Chicago's CTA receives about 50% of its operating budget from taxes. Should I get on the next Metra train and refuse to pay the ticket price?
  - sp332 14y ago
    Let's say a university is going to do some research. They look around for funds and decide to do a project that the government is offering some grant money for. In that case, the government's money didn't really pay for the research, it just influenced what direction it went. I think the grant money did its intended job even if the results aren't public.
rmc 14y ago
This is exactly the same argument that Bill Gates used in 1976 in "Open Letter to Hobbyists", asking: "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" Here we are, nearly 40 years later, standing next to Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and all the open source software in the world, and we can say, Yes, people will do this work for free. The fundamental premises of your argument (that people won't do it for free) has been disproved.

toomuchtodo 14y ago

How much does Wikipedia charge me to make a copy of an article? What is Wikipedia's annual burn rate?

andreasvc 14y ago
There's a difference between volunteer-written Wikipedia articles and JSTOR documents curated by professional scholars; e.g., the latter are acceptable for citations.
MichaelSalib 14y ago
Wikipedia scans and digitizes old paper articles? In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming.
- malandrew 14y ago
  Personally, I'd be fine handing over all journal publishing responsibilities to Google. The one great thing that Google has going for it is that many many many of the engineers there came from academia and understand the value of open access to information. I don't care if they run ads while they do so. It would be orders of magnitude better than the status quo.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I fail to understand how a for-profit corporation that sells your privacy to the $500 billion advertising/media/branding industry is a better steward of this information than a not for profit organization that simply charges a fee for their services.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - tzs 14y ago
    No, let's not do this. We don't need the scientific literature fucked as badly as Google fucked the USENET archives.
    - malandrew 14y ago
      Enlighten me. I'm curious.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        Google made a complete hash out of the Usenet archives that they bought from DejaNews; you could literally issue the same search month after month and watch yourself getting progressively fewer and fewer results.
  - duaneb 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure Google imposes the same limitations JSTOR does for public domain stuff. Google and JSTOR are both the status quo for digital copies of public domain stuff.
- rmc 14y ago
  In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming. Writing an encyclopedia is time consuming, but we did that. Walking & driving all over the world is time consuming, but the OpenStreetMap community has done that. Scanning & digitizing old public domain books is time consuming, but the Project Gutenberg project has done that. What's next?
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  Sir, I've worked on/off with Project Gutenberg for over 12 years (since I was 18). I've mailed thousands of CDs/DVDs full of PG's library to people in thirdwave world countries, and I've also reviewed hundreds of books, on my own time and for no compensation, for their Distributed Proofreaders project (http://www.pgdp.net/c/ http://www.pgdp.net/c/). No, I have not tried to digitize old journals. But I HAVE helped contribute to the digitization and distribution of public domain works. I'm aware of the time and financial resource commitments involved.
joegaudet 14y ago
Additionally I am pretty sure Wikipedia's annual burn rate is pretty high... Hence the donation request every year and all..
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  My argument is that Wikipedia has more transparency and a lower burn rate than JSTOR. Also, I would accept the Internet Archive as a feasible repository for the data in question vs JSTOR.

politician 14y ago

If you're really asking what I prefer, then I prefer making documents available gratis perhaps after the cost of digitizing them has been recouped. Some additional charge for the ongoing cost of storage and bandwidth would need to be worked out. However, $19 per article is unreasonable (c.f. Amazon S3 Requestor-Pays buckets $0.12/GiB).

rayiner 14y ago
What do we know about JSTOR's cost structure? Is the $19 the result of subsidization within the system? I'd imagine there are a ton of articles on JSTOR which nobody ever reads, the digitization of which is subsidized by that of the popular articles. I'd also imagine that a la carte purchases subsidize subscriptions for universities. Also, the underlying content isn't necessarily free. Most of the popular journals charge subscription fees, and I'd imagine JSTOR doesn't get them all for free.
- politician 14y ago
  You've raised several points. I grant that a $19 article may represent subsidization in their system, but argue that they have an ethical obligation derived from their position as a steward to make the components of that price transparent. It's my understanding that universities pay significant amounts for site licenses and that general public purchases do not subsidize that access. By perpetuating a watermark or attribution on a public domain work digitized by JSTOR, are we as a society not implicitly granting JSTOR a right on the work which it ought not have? Digitization is a one-time salvage operation. Should we conflate it with copyright through watermarks? Regarding JSTOR, journals, and non-public-domain works -- that is a private property matter. They ought to be able to charge what the market will bear.
  - kanzure 14y ago
    > It's my understanding that universities pay significant amounts for site > licenses and that general public purchases do not subsidize that access. Yeah, I am pretty baffled with how non-institutional users are requested to pay for access, both on JSTOR and other publisher's sites. Surely this is not a large source of income? arXiv (always pointed out as a shining example of something going right) has recently started requesting membership fees to be paid by the top 200 institutional users. Other than that, the public is still able to go to the site and read about dark matter and substring bananas. You know, what probably happened was that when the content was starting to get digitized, the publishers only had users that were accessing from universities. So they charged the universities just like they previously did for subscriptions to the bound book issues. At the time, there was probably no concept of doing any sort of analytics to figure out where downloads were coming from, so they didn't think that maybe they should just allow anyone to download, and then setup a deal with colleges to pay their fair share. I think the arXiv model is worth some more investigation.. (This ignores all the actual truths like, they have to maximize shareholder value, they have to make as much money as possible, their incentives are aligned differently, etc. Instead it is simply focusing on the reason why "individual purchase" is an option that doesn't seem to make sense to non-institutional members like the general public.)

rayiner 14y ago

JSTOR is such a bizarre target to pick. 1) Some of the articles on JSTOR are the product of complete public funding. But many are not. Many are the result of partial or complete university funding. 2) All the work of editing the underlying journals, which is very time consuming, is generally not publicly funded. 3) All of the work of digitizing those journal articles is not free. When Google undertakes to digitize such content, they charge you by selling your privacy to others. JSTOR just asks you to pay a fee for their service. Who is the bad guy here?

rhizome 14y ago
It doesn't have to be "complete" public funding. I'm gonna go ahead and guess that many, many of the universities that may have partially funded the research also receive tax dollars. This last part is such a huge issue here, I think. "Well it wasn't very many tax dollars..." Yeah, well let's have our share then. One download of each document that tax dollars helped pay for seems fair to me.
- mjn 14y ago
  I agree with that, but I'd also say openness mandates should be added to every entity that takes taxpayer funding, including, for example, Lockheed, SpaceX, and just about every pharmaceutical company.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Works for me.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Overall, university research is about 50/50 split between public dollars and private dollars. Coincidentally, Chicago's CTA receives about 50% of its operating budget from taxes. Should I get on the next Metra train and refuse to pay the ticket price?
- sp332 14y ago
  Let's say a university is going to do some research. They look around for funds and decide to do a project that the government is offering some grant money for. In that case, the government's money didn't really pay for the research, it just influenced what direction it went. I think the grant money did its intended job even if the results aren't public.

rmc 14y ago

This is exactly the same argument that Bill Gates used in 1976 in "Open Letter to Hobbyists", asking: "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" Here we are, nearly 40 years later, standing next to Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and all the open source software in the world, and we can say, Yes, people will do this work for free. The fundamental premises of your argument (that people won't do it for free) has been disproved.