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As I wrote earlier, I don't think universities would ever provide a pirated archive. They wouldn't need to. Grad students talk. They pass around USB drives. And

• jlgreco 14y ago
  Such a system would never replace a subscription to JSTOR. You have massive tunnel vision if you honestly think it could.
  • anonymouz 14y ago
    It could cause them financial harm. Libraries have a fixed budget and choose wisely which subscriptions to take. If people at a department already know where to get the stuff that JSTOR offers for free, that will make the JSTOR subscription less valuable and other subscriptions more valuable to them. Academics are quite used to being creative in acquiring articles. It's not untypical to ask colleagues and friends at other universities to scan and email articles that they can't get access to through their own library. Before the advent of the Internet this was done with letters. Downloading a torrent is a minor inconvenience in comparison. A large majority of people I have talked to have at some point acquired scans of at least on book online (be it to give it to students because the library has only one copy, for convenience during travelling or because the local library has no copies and an interlibrary loan would take some time while they need the book now).