JSTOR for books

I’m hopeful that eventually Google Books will take off, and they’ll get the advertising model right so that copyrighted books will make it in. Then you won’t need to pay a subscription fee at all. Then copyrighted books will become part of the Googlemind, just as web pages and public-domain books are right now.

It’s happening slowly. The New Yorker will, I believe, soon be putting its entire archive into the public web. The New York Times has already done so. The Times’s “Open” blog documents the open-source work they’re doing in support of the archival mission (among other things). It’s the rare commercial source of knowledge that understands its role within the larger web. Publishers may get there last, and Google may need to prod them, but it’ll happen. Give it 10 years, and I bet you’ll see a lot more copyrighted books on the web.

I subscribed a number of weeks ago to Questia, and so far it is well worth the $75 (sale price). While you can’t download books, I am finding that they have a very nice amount of newly published books by many of the important academic presses, at least for the humanities.

Firstly, the ebook clearinghouses for academic materials are already pretty nice, if your institution is hip enough to seriously invest in them: there are community colleges with Sameness and Substance Renewed and Vagueness available electronically, material they might not ever buy in book form. Secondly, the widely distributed PDFs of academic books (and “you” know who “you” are) are driving prices of even trade paperbacks up considerably, which will give added impetus to the licensed-eboook bandwagon.

…and OUP have http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/

so why is Oxford Scholarship Online not telling us how cheap or expensive they are??

I agree that JSTOR for books (not just scholarly!) would be very very nice….

I already feel bad about ‘Phoo’, which is excessively scornful towards the humanities and plumbers. If you can imagine an interjection that means ‘not only does our system not support the inquiry of its free citizens, it undermines utilitarian efforts into which it is sinking money’, please substitute it.

“Cuz if you ain’t connected tight enough to get a JSTOR password somewhere”

“Connected tight enough” ought to mean having a library card. The charge for public libraries is so modest, that if your library doesn’t subscribe you ought to be lobbying them to do so.

I agree that JSTOR ought to be free to everyone, but it costs a lot to run, and no one yet seems to have offered to cover all the costs. It is free in Africa, which seems like the highest priority for a subsidy.

I may be wrong–and will flip my wig if I am–but I don’t think “having a public library card” is the same as, “can log on at home, download pdfs of important articles, and keep them in nicely organized directories, printable when I need them.”

That is: it’s one thing to be able to go to the local library and look at something–another altogether to be able to “use JSTOR,” on any meaningful scope of the word ‘use.’

I mean: can I, with library card, log in to Hennepin Country Library System and get JSTOR articles? Plus: if so, do not, under any circumstances, tell John Emerson! [cheerful play/irony emoticon goes here]

As for Safari: back when I was much more of a techie, I was an early subscriber. Now, not so much. Glad to see they’ve brought other presses into the fold, as it’s a great idea–and:

YES, YES, YES, O YES it would be a killer idea to have a university press consortium for this. It’s really ridiculous that a dilettante like me is expected to pay something like $50 (or more!) for an academic book … in paperback! $58.00 for Ruby Blondell’s Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues!?

The Quiggin/Turnipseed/Quiggin volley-and-return nicely brings the whole thing forward.
“Ought to” though, up against “can and does”.
JSTOR is, at least from my impression of their business model, very unlikely to say “go” on the free access.
And I think a lot of academics aren’t really catching how exclusive these things are.
The Library of Congress Prints &Photographs Online should be the template, but sadly emulation of xxx pay’n’wank seems to be the case for now.

John, have you ever come across a public library that offers remote access to JSTOR? I am pretty sure that Joel is right and they generally don’t. (I don’t know whether this is because of JSTOR’s licensing conditions.) And if this is true then the point to bear in mind is that while joining the library may be cheap or free printing charges are likely to be fairly high so unless you are prepared to sit in front of a terminal to read the articles you want, getting access to them that way is going to be expensive as well as inconvenient.

“John, have you ever come across a public library that offers remote access to JSTOR?”

Not just one, but two, of the libraries I have cards to offer remote access to JSTOR.

Neil, Roy’s point does not seem minor to me. He raises the question of both the nature of the JSTOR model and its reception among academics for very good reasons. JSTOR had blinders on when it was created, and those who enjoy it because of their association with one or another institution are wearing the selfsame shades. There are larger questions about IP and ultimately about how we regard human knowledge — a right? a privilege? a means of keeping an economics of scarcity going? — that are shrouded when analogies are used carelessly.

JSTOR is non-profit, just like a library. It’s just that it doesn’t have anyone except the users to pay the bills, so it has to charge.

The charge for a large library (typically one serving more than 1 million people with a budget in excess of $5 million) is $15K upfront and $5K/year. A small library pays $3000 upfront and $750/year.

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/participate/new/fees/pubLibraries.jsp

I can’t imagine that JSTOR is making huge profits out of that, even relative to the marginal cost of extra server capacity. And it seems to me that a lot more libraries should be taking up the offer.

Also: Thoreau said that in “Life Without Principle,” I believe–but what’s a source cite among those weeping with joy?

I take it back.
Or most of it. Or a big part of it.
This, in an email from a friend whose comment here is probably hung in moderation, someone who’s way more of a scholar than I am but equally unaffiliated, and thus stymied frequently by JSTOR’s tantalizing google prominence:

“jstor’s relation to money is laid out in the interview I did with the director back when. this is not to me a game changer. they digitized then walled scholarship. There’s a ‘moving’ wall – you can’t see recent scholarship. What you can see is 3, 5 or 7 years old. There’s cash payment, dictated by greedy publishers still stuck in print. Single articles 15 years old going for $30. This doesn’t do anything for my sense of what’s reasonable.

“Non profit” is a bogus term – they all make profit, it’s just how it’s manipulated.

the dude never let my statement show[meaning his comment, no doubt in moderation, here]. I tried to make the case that you were making an important point. That this has to do with people thinking they can manipulate human knowledge. It’s wrong. I was surprised to see you back off. [chagrin]

As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s not that JSTOR itself should be free, but that it has failed to persuade anyone that it’s really making an effort to explore micropayment or other sensible means of opening itself up.

I have not harped on this theme without some semblance of reason, I hope…”

Now it feels like I got chumped off by JSTOR’s patrician p.r.
Ultimately I think it’s the same question as the purpose of libraries, and education, and public health.
The advancement of what we are as a whole, which means bringing in the outliers, or maintenance of the hierarchies of the status quo, which means losers lose.
I’d like to believe JSTOR really is about trying to get that knowledge out there, to everybody. I don’t like being as cynical as I am. But he’s dug into it pretty far, and I trust his take on it.

They’re enabling the publishers’ greed. By your own admission.
Most of it’s an instinctive distrust, nothing legally solid on my part, a smell more than a pile of something redolent.
It was a mistake to assume JSTOR shared David Rumsey’s opportunistic greed viz. public domain material. Because the enterprise carries a strong odor of greed in action that was an easy mistake to make.
I went from that mistaken assumption to buying their Mission Statement whole and back to a skeptic’s take on their professed good intentions, where I remain as of this writing. All in one day, right here in full view.
Most of the commenters here, and obviously the site members, are academics. So JSTOR’s like tap water, just there when you turn on the faucet. That creates the illusion it’s publicly available.
My friend is in a different time zone and has retired for the evening. If we get a chance to talk about it tomorrow I’ll report back here with something more substantial than these suspicions of hermeneutic despotism.

No Roy, I did not admit any such thing. And the blog you cited made it clear that this is not the case:

The publishers give their older content to JSTOR in part because they deem it to have little or no economic value.

.

That is, if JSTOR does not make this available, no one will. For the publishers, it’s a tiny bonus. Its existence makes almost no difference to the economics of publishing. The enabling claim is clearly false. The only thing you can accuse JSTOR of is participating in a corrupt system, and thereby collusion. That’s true. It is also true for all the academics around here. Unlike JSTOR, academic’s participation is necessary for the continuation of the system (though unlike JSTOR, academics find it very difficult to opt out of the system).

It’s important to distinguish here between journals published by academic societies and those from commercial publishers. The former are usually fairly cheap and are (or at least were in the beginning) the main ones to participate in JSTOR. The moving wall was designed to encourage subscriber-members (mostly academics) to keep paying enough to cover operating costs.

The commercial publishers now mostly have their own (very expensive) equivalents of JSTOR for online access like ScienceDirect.

With the greatest respect to all participants, I would like someone to explain why they seem to believe that they, personally, are entitled to enjoy the fruits of others’ intellectual labours for free – in circumstances where the said others have not explicitly intended to provide those fruits gratis and for nuthin’.

By all means get authors to agree to provide you, el greato publico, with their works for nothing. And good luck with that – a lot will. By all means play up the fine and longstanding role of libraries in giving people effective access that is free, or nearly free, at the point of delivery – that is a pinnacle of our civilisation. But don’t complain about not being able to get everything for free. It’s infantile.

Any moment now someone is going to suggest creating some sort of free open university.

Oh, look.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_university

Ebrary and the ACLS Humanities e-book project go some of the way towards a book JSTOR. The interfaces weren’t the best back when I had an institutional affiliation that gave me access a few years ago, but I read a few books that way.

The charge for a large library (typically one serving more than 1 million people with a budget in excess of $5 million) is $15K upfront and $5K/year

huh. I’d not realized the price was that low. So, why would it be so hard to open access to the entire world? At those rates, $4 million/year would pay the fees for all the US and the EU, and we could stop faffing around begging friends to copy articles. Is this not a problem that could be solved with a small amount of political will and/or money?

Also, whether Roy is out of order in being pissed off with JSTOR… Part of JSTOR’s job is to stop people like Roy from reading scholarly articles. In this respect, they are like the bouncer outside a private club. Maybe it is true that the bouncer is only doing his job, that it’s the members or owners of the club who make the rules, but still… it’s not too hard to understand why people might regard him as an arsehole.

We use this at the University I work at for our health professions books. Seems to work alright. I’d like to see a case study or two though to get a feel for how this plays out over a longer period.

I accept that JSTOR can’t just give access to everybody without anybody giving any money to JSTOR, since servers and copyright permissions aren’t free. But the fact that Academia (as an entity) hasn’t yet addressed the issue of JSTOR not having enough money to give free access to all reflects very badly on Academia. Specifically, it makes any claim to social and/or intellectual good as a primary goal a laughable and hypocritical lie.

I am not one of those people who harrumphs about postmodernism or lesbian studies or whatever. I don’t think that working for the good of society has to mean turning a profit. I love the humanities as much as the sciences, maybe more, and deeply respect academics who contribute to the body of human knowledge in any field. That’s why I want to read their goddamn papers! (And no, I can’t just “get a library card”, because I live in a country where the only publicly-accessible subscribing library doesn’t allow remote access, as far as I can tell.)

Making access to JSTOR free to all is more important than any individual conference, any individual laboratory. That institutions continue to hold conferences and build laboratories while telling those outside the walls to go eat library-card cake says something deeply unpleasant about the real priorities of today’s higher education.

JSTOR was conceived before Google. Google changed the model of access and awareness on the net. Still, one must note that in the very moment that the promise of open access to resources hitherto for all sorts of reasons unavailable made itself known, what actually happened was a cordoning off of resources by middlemen, basing their logic and business model on outmoded scarcities.

Unless I’m mistaken, professors do not write articles for direct dollah compensation – if that’s what they have been doing, what a sack of losers! Their value comes in other forms.

JSTOR (and its many semblables, ARTstor, the Amica Library, etc.) are small beans middlemen offering to deliver knowledge as a commodity at the moment when this is no longer necessary. It’s a USian symptom, mostly. European scholars have been looking at other models that would no doubt cause certain epithets to spew from Ms. Palin and her aged drudo.

See for example:

http://www.ec-petition.eu/
http://www.arl.org/sparc/

Peter Suber’s blog is essential:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Other initiatives:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/icfs-isc101608.php
http://www.plos.org/
http://gslis.simmons.edu/podcasts/index.php?id=76
http://www.opendoar.org/
etc.

In the current environment, artificial markets in human cognition are not only unaffordable, they are absurd.

So what happens to the texts when your time expires?

Are you merely locked out, or do they warp into unreadable ASCII or degrade into pixel dust?

JQ @54: That’s the least satisfactory solution. Before my wife started grad school, I seriously thought of joining (in addition to my memberships in PEN and the NBCC, plus various local museums/libraries–and the PIRGs, et. al. whom I can’t resist at the doorstop) the American History Association and… you know: it would be cheaper to charter your home as a library and subscribe to JSTOR as a library–by far than to join the range of journals from which a respectably curious person might like to read articles on JSTOR.

Of course, the best thing to do would be to just take extension classes from the cheapest local school from whose library you could get JSTOR access… which I have also considered (prior to my finding, thanks to you, that I can get the same access through the county library as I previously received through a major research university).

On the whole, I’m pleased that I discovered my good luck, but agree with most of the other non-academics who read this site: “it’s a real mother to get access to the (mostly state-subsidized) fruits of academic research.”

Don’t even get me started on conferences…

Of course, as a freelance journalist (now and then), it’s also a real mother not to have a big newspaper picking up the tab for, say, Nexis. Or to be outside the loop on academic desk copies (do they still do that?). Or a host of other things.

Basically, what everyone who bitches about these things bitches about is that, while we don’t really bitch too loudly about not having an Idra-Presse 5000 ton die cast machine in our garage (it wouldn’t fit, but…), we’d sure like to have the equivalent in intellectual resources. Precisely because intellectual capital doesn’t require the same kinds of investments and risks that physical capital does… in most cases. And the ‘Net makes it painfully obvious that we have a long way to go in squaring this.

Which is why John H’s post was so salacious-making: “Oh, what we wish we had… and how paltry what we grasp now is by comparison to what we’d love to wrap our arms around.”

Google just announced that it will be offering libraries subscription access to out-of-print (but still under copyright) books which it has scanned.