Comments on: JSTOR

By: Kerim Friedman

Kerim Friedman — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 16:47:41 +0000

I just thought I’d point out that JSTOR’s decision not to provide full text in their PDF files is only a minor inconvenience. It is very easy, using most desktop OCR software, to re-scan the PDF file and produce a version with searchable and selectable text. Of course, it would be even easier if JSTOR didn’t try to separate the text from the image in the first place….

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 01:15:35 +0000

Re paying year after year for the same thing, I’m currently working on a grant to fund JSTOR for 5 years at our CC library. There’s a not very hefty (relatively speaking) set-up fee, plus yearly fees that are also fairly nominal (in our case, I know people who spend more on lattes in a year). Also, their pricing is on a reasonable sliding scale that takes into account the number of students at the institution and whether it’s a two- or four-year institution. You can also select from a number of additional, more specialized databases as add-ons. My impression is that the set-up fee pays for initial access to all the stuff already in the chosen databases, and the yearly fees pay for that years’ acquisitions.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 18:55:20 +0000

George: yes, and no. I thought John’s post was more about the internet and information availability. My objection was not so much over the initial correction as to the cost of JSTOR, but rather the nitpicking over it after the correction was made. The fact is that for many, JSTOR still can be free in the way that roads or any other public services are—that is, not free, but there are no up-front costs to the user. How its relative success or failure may have influenced other such information projects (like Project Gutenberg, the ORB, etc.) is an interesting topic, much more so than whether John’s original post was entirely accurate.

By: George Williams

George Williams — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 17:24:10 +0000

“Nitpicking over whether it’s free is distracting from whether JSTOR is a good and useful tool.” 1) These are mutually exclusive concerns? 2) Isn’t the question of whether it’s free or not the point of this discussion? (See the original Quiggin post).

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:54:55 +0000

In response to Walt Pohl and Joel, whose comments are typical of the anti-intellectual trend that permeates much of American society and displays little or know knowledge of how the vast majority of academics live: Academic, yes. Pampered, hardly. I have JSTOR access for two reasons. First, I pay for a subscription to back issues of the AHR and a couple of other journals on top of my American Historical Association membershp, out of my own pocket most years, although occasionally, I can use meager professional development funds and just pay the taxes. Otherwise, I have to drag my sorry community college, full-time contingent, don’t-know-if-I-have-a-job-for-sure-next-year arse over to UW and stand in line for the public access terminals just like any other person. Meanwhile, I have to work the same 60 hours a week that most of my colleagues do, if I want to keep up with classes, committees, and publications so that I can compete on the job market. pampered. Oh—Napolean’s underwear? Nitpicking over whether it’s free is distracting from whether JSTOR is a good and useful tool.

By: Cathy

Cathy — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:49:37 +0000

George Williams commented that he thought that JSTOR was overcharging for access to their journals. As the woman responsible for paying the bills at my institution, I can tell you that I consider JSTOR an absolute bargin for the amount of money I pay for it every year. Our university is only 40 years old and doesn’t have a tremendous run of periodical back files. JSTOR provides this for us at a low cost and without taking up additional space. It also provides it in an electronic format, which is what your average undergraduate student wants these days. The Mellon Foundation grant that paided for the inital JSTOR demo project was never designed to provide access forever. The JSTOR database is so large (and getting larger by the day) that I don’t think it would be realistic to expect any one institution to host it for free. According to the statistics page I just checked, JSTOR had a total of 30.6 million searches in 2003. That’s a lot of searches to ask any one institution to absorb.

By: George Williams

George Williams — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 13:33:49 +0000

I use JSTOR. I like being able to use JSTOR. My students like being able to use JSTOR. This does not mean that there are not problems with it. I would appreciate a pointer to a resource explaining the economics of producing a journal. I believe that the amount of money charged by JSTOR for access is significantly higher than it should be. But I have nothing to back up that belief. Joel writes, “Somebody always pays, but everybody seems to think it should always be somebody else.” I think this misses the point. Somebody has already paid for this information. Why are we paying for it again (and again and again and again, year after year in subscription costs to access the same, not new, information). There are plenty of massive collections of searchable online texts available on the web that have been paid for already (by grant money from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Grant Program, the National Science Foundation, etc…). Take a look at the Blake Archive, the Making of America Project, the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, the Dickinson Electronic Archives, the Walt Whitman Archive, the American Memory Project. You do not need to subscribe to these resources in order to access what they have to offer. Why should JSTOR be any different? Matt Kirschenbaum writes, “The most damning way to state the academic journal situation is probably this: universities pay its faculty (in part) to conduct research. Faculty then publish that research in third-party journals (for the sake of peer review of course), from whom the university then has to buy it back—or else just as often can’t afford to.”

By: djw

djw — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 07:53:04 +0000

And if it’s really as cheap as less than one commercial journal subscription, it seems at least plausible that some public libraries could be convinced to sign on, with sufficient interest. Have you made requests of your local public library?

By: DJW

DJW — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 07:49:19 +0000

This whole discussion is weird. I know there is a certain subset of the population that enjoys complaining about how spoiled and out of touch academics are, and they may have a point, but this ain’t it. JSTOR is a way for their employer to provide the tools necessary for them to do their job. I think most academics actually do understand that JSTOR—and indeed, everything in their libraries—are not free. Those spoiled secretaries! All the free pencils they can use, and they never even have to pay for them! etc. I do think it’s unfortunate, Walt Pohl, that you can’t access JSTOR at your local state U. I’m pretty sure that in Washington the public can access JSTOR along with the stacks. But it does seem odd that your frustration with JSTOR seems to stem from the view that they’re denying you something you’re entitled. It takes a lot of resources to put all that stuff online, and I think it would be great if it were free and public, but it’s far from clear why you would assume that is in some sense owed to you (not an actual claim you make, but a reasonable inference from your tone).

By: Joel

Joel — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 07:12:53 +0000

Walt Pohl: “JSTOR has done more than anything else to impede the future, not bring it about. By giving academics easy access to journals, but hiding the costs from them, it helps put off the day when the fruits of academia are available to all.” Academics will be the last to understand anything about the costs of bearing their fruits (and nuts), so blithely do they take their paychecks for granted. The main purpose of JSTOR, as I see it, is to preserve the past, for some journals the far past, in a way that does not require turning every campus into a library construction site instead of a research and instruction site. Somebody always pays, but everybody seems to think it should always be somebody else.

By: anand sarwate

anand sarwate — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 22:05:58 +0000

I don’t think the claim can be made that JSTOR is the best of all possible worlds. Journals cost time and money to print, and it only makes sense for JSTOR to charge some sort of fee. I doubt that there will ever be a day in which “the fruits of academia are available to all.” How should they be made free? Through the public libraries, I suppose. And thus JSTOR is evil because they charge a fee to libraries for a service, i.e. the digitization and software to search and database. Libraries pay for article databases—should those also be free? Who is going to gather the content? In my field (electrical engineering), almost all important journals are published by our professional organization, the IEEE. They charge (arguably too large) a fee for subscription to their very comprehensive online library. CiteSeer and arXiV are nice and all, but don’t have the same features as for-pay services. It’s not as if they are charging for nothing. This is in contrast to Reed-Elsevier, from whose money-sucking bowls I have received broken PDFs, scanned documents from 1997, and other atrocities. As the content producer, surely they have access to the original document in whatever camera-ready format they use and could have produced a text-searchable PDF. There the cost does not correspond to quality of service. Perhaps the best solution is to write into every publicly funded grant that publications generated from that research be posted on some government website for that the public can access them for free.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 21:31:11 +0000

Thanks for corrections, which have been noted in the update. As is clear, bloggers don’t need fact checkers when they have commenters I’ll point out that JSTOR is available, cheaply, to public libraries and secondary schools in the US. Hopefully, this will be extended more broadly over time. In general, I think there is an element of “the perfect is the enemy of the good” in the comments. If you read the book you’ll see how much trouble there was in getting journals to forgo the illusory possibilities of making vast fortunes from the intellectual property in their back issues.

By: Nat Whilk

Nat Whilk — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 21:12:41 +0000

Walt, what are you referring to when you mention “truly free access” to the latest research in mathematics?

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 21:06:58 +0000

Another Damned Midievalist’s attitude is the typical response of a pampered academic. At my local publicly-funded university, you have to be a student/faculty/staff to use JSTOR. What can be more antithetical to the ideal of a public university? Either you’re a member of the privileged class of academics, or you have to do without. JSTOR has done more than anything else to impede the future, not bring it about. By giving academics easy access to journals, but hiding the costs from them, it helps put off the day when the fruits of academia are available to all. I can already stay up to date in the latest research in computer science and mathematics (and physics, if I knew anything about physics), because they have already made the transition to truly free access. Why should the humanities or social sciences be any different?

By: antirealist

antirealist — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 20:39:38 +0000

JSTOR … is free in the sense that members of the general public can often access it without paying up front by virtue of the fact that public institutions of higher learning are paid for by taxpayers. Taxpayers cannot, therefore, be barred from going into the library and using the databases and stacks, although they may have to pay additional fees for a library card or printing privileges… It depends where you are, I suppose. My experience of JSTOR has been that that access was restricted to students, staff and faculty. Even members of the public with research reader cards were out of luck.