6 ms·

> Little to no commercial value? Have you ever tried to sell a diamon, err, scholarly article?

by Natsu 14y ago

aheilbut 14y ago
Rightly or wrongly, Elsevier makes a pretty decent business out of it.
whyenot 14y ago
Elsevier et al have done very well selling articles bundled as journal subscriptions. Claiming articles have no commercial value while at the same time railing against publishers is cognitive dissonance at its finest.
- OmarIsmail 14y ago
  His point is that the scholarly articles (like diamonds) can be easily tracked, and therefore determined if illegally sold or not. Since legitimate buyers - University professors, etc - want to be sure they are on the up and up, the won't purchase illegally obtained goods. Therefore, there would have been no buyers for the articles "stolen".
  - Natsu 14y ago
    Exactly. I can't believe that Aaron would have been able to sell them, even if he had intended to. And I can't seriously believe that he ever intended to, or that the prosecutors could have truly believed that he intended to. Yes, they are doing that themselves. But hopefully not for much longer if the internet has anything to say about that. I applaud all of the scientists who are working hard to make their research more open.
  - MichaelSalib 14y ago
    That doesn't make sense. Imagine a world where Swartz managed to destroy JSTOR. A professor asks his grad students to read an article. They can either dig it out of the archival stacks and read it there or wait for interlibrary loan or...use a torrented copy or illegal DVD they bought on the street at their last academic conference. There is no way to track which one they did. No one will ever know. And no one will care: all the prof cares about is whether his students read the damn article; he doesn't care how they got it. He's completely focused on getting his research done, writing grant proposals, etc.
    - smsm42 14y ago
      Swartz never intended to destroy JSTOR. He wanted to provide access to the articles (many of them, I'm sure, public financed and should be publicly accessible anyway) to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR, but if the access to the storage could be provided much cheaper - in theory, if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR - I see no reason why JSTOR should be sacred.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        > if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR And spoilers: it's not. In order to make it would you would have to recreate everything JSTOR currently does, which would result in a JSTOR not called JSTOR. One with legal liability at that.
        smsm42 14y ago
        It may very well be so, then the project of copying JSTOR would be marginal and would descend into oblivion without any external intervention.
      - MichaelSalib 14y ago
        With respect, the fact that he wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto suggests that he did want to destroy JSTOR as a going concern. Now, maybe he didn't think releasing their archive would be enough, but he was clearly gunning for them. He wanted to provide access to the articles to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR JSTOR prorates its fees so that poor institutions pay much less than rich institutions. And all of Africa gets JSTOR for free. Now, even individuals can get capped free articles from JSTOR. If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR? Finally, do you understand that most of what JSTOR charges pays for either licensing the journal content (JSTOR doesn't own copyright for the journals it includes) or for scanning/digitizing new content? The costs that JSTOR charges pay for a hell of a lot more than a few web sites pushing PDFs to clients.
MichaelSalib 14y ago
JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable. I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire business would have withered and died. Once you can buy a DVD on the street for $3 that held the entire thing, it gets harder and harder for university libraries to justify paying $50K/year. Their customer base wouldn't dry up overnight but over a few years, you'd see library departments squeezed for cash (and they all are) killing their subscriptions. With JSTOR access drying up, grad students and professors would make do by torrenting or copying DVDs; it would be an open secret, a technically illegal but universally accepted practice. I don't think Swartz could have profited from this scheme, but he could have destroyed a large amount of financial value; JSTOR's a $50million/year organization.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  This is absolute bullshit. There is no way in hell any university in a developed nation would drop their subscription to JSTOR. JSTOR keeps them on the right side of copyright law, keeps itself up to date, and provides infrastructure that the vast majority of university users find essential. Individuals not affiliated with universities may find such a pirated collection useful, but such individuals currently make up a fraction of one percent of JSTOR's revenue.
  - MichaelSalib 14y ago
    Journals in the library + interlibrary loan keep them on the right side of copyright law. And many more expensive subscriptions provide universities with access to parts of the JSTOR archive. What's more, there are no university copyright investigations to fear: no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read (how could that even work?), but even if they did, grad students have a perfectly legal explanation: they can just say they read/acquired their documents from the library and no one can prove otherwise. Universities aren't stupid; they know there's no threat from dropping JSTOR and they can count to $50,000 all too well.
    - jlgreco 14y ago

> Little to no commercial value? Have you ever tried to sell a diamon, err, scholarly article?

by Natsu 14y ago

> Little to no commercial value? Have you ever tried to sell a diamon, err, scholarly article?

aheilbut 14y ago

Rightly or wrongly, Elsevier makes a pretty decent business out of it.

whyenot 14y ago

Elsevier et al have done very well selling articles bundled as journal subscriptions. Claiming articles have no commercial value while at the same time railing against publishers is cognitive dissonance at its finest.

OmarIsmail 14y ago
His point is that the scholarly articles (like diamonds) can be easily tracked, and therefore determined if illegally sold or not. Since legitimate buyers - University professors, etc - want to be sure they are on the up and up, the won't purchase illegally obtained goods. Therefore, there would have been no buyers for the articles "stolen".
- Natsu 14y ago
  Exactly. I can't believe that Aaron would have been able to sell them, even if he had intended to. And I can't seriously believe that he ever intended to, or that the prosecutors could have truly believed that he intended to. Yes, they are doing that themselves. But hopefully not for much longer if the internet has anything to say about that. I applaud all of the scientists who are working hard to make their research more open.
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  That doesn't make sense. Imagine a world where Swartz managed to destroy JSTOR. A professor asks his grad students to read an article. They can either dig it out of the archival stacks and read it there or wait for interlibrary loan or...use a torrented copy or illegal DVD they bought on the street at their last academic conference. There is no way to track which one they did. No one will ever know. And no one will care: all the prof cares about is whether his students read the damn article; he doesn't care how they got it. He's completely focused on getting his research done, writing grant proposals, etc.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    Swartz never intended to destroy JSTOR. He wanted to provide access to the articles (many of them, I'm sure, public financed and should be publicly accessible anyway) to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR, but if the access to the storage could be provided much cheaper - in theory, if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR - I see no reason why JSTOR should be sacred.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      > if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR And spoilers: it's not. In order to make it would you would have to recreate everything JSTOR currently does, which would result in a JSTOR not called JSTOR. One with legal liability at that.
      - smsm42 14y ago
        It may very well be so, then the project of copying JSTOR would be marginal and would descend into oblivion without any external intervention.
    - MichaelSalib 14y ago
      With respect, the fact that he wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto suggests that he did want to destroy JSTOR as a going concern. Now, maybe he didn't think releasing their archive would be enough, but he was clearly gunning for them. He wanted to provide access to the articles to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR JSTOR prorates its fees so that poor institutions pay much less than rich institutions. And all of Africa gets JSTOR for free. Now, even individuals can get capped free articles from JSTOR. If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR? Finally, do you understand that most of what JSTOR charges pays for either licensing the journal content (JSTOR doesn't own copyright for the journals it includes) or for scanning/digitizing new content? The costs that JSTOR charges pay for a hell of a lot more than a few web sites pushing PDFs to clients.

MichaelSalib 14y ago

JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable. I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire business would have withered and died. Once you can buy a DVD on the street for $3 that held the entire thing, it gets harder and harder for university libraries to justify paying $50K/year. Their customer base wouldn't dry up overnight but over a few years, you'd see library departments squeezed for cash (and they all are) killing their subscriptions. With JSTOR access drying up, grad students and professors would make do by torrenting or copying DVDs; it would be an open secret, a technically illegal but universally accepted practice. I don't think Swartz could have profited from this scheme, but he could have destroyed a large amount of financial value; JSTOR's a $50million/year organization.

jlgreco 14y ago
This is absolute bullshit. There is no way in hell any university in a developed nation would drop their subscription to JSTOR. JSTOR keeps them on the right side of copyright law, keeps itself up to date, and provides infrastructure that the vast majority of university users find essential. Individuals not affiliated with universities may find such a pirated collection useful, but such individuals currently make up a fraction of one percent of JSTOR's revenue.
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  Journals in the library + interlibrary loan keep them on the right side of copyright law. And many more expensive subscriptions provide universities with access to parts of the JSTOR archive. What's more, there are no university copyright investigations to fear: no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read (how could that even work?), but even if they did, grad students have a perfectly legal explanation: they can just say they read/acquired their documents from the library and no one can prove otherwise. Universities aren't stupid; they know there's no threat from dropping JSTOR and they can count to $50,000 all too well.
  - jlgreco 14y ago