A lot of those academics work at institutions (or in fields) that have repositories that will serve those papers free to the world, if the academics care to deposit them there (and if they haven’t already signed their rights away to a journal that won’t let them do that.)

Here’s one for my university, for instance. (This one includes both open access papers and non-open-access dissertations, but several thousand of the items there are open access.)

If you write academic papers, you might want to look into what options you have for making your material available this way. (You can also encourage academics you follow to do the same.) Many publishers already allow their authors to self-archive their own papers in repositories like these, and some advocacy groups have also drawn up recommended contract addenda so that authors can reserve the right to do so, which I’ve done myself in the past.

(Oh, and if you decide to go the open access route with a published book of yours, past or present, you can also let me know about it, and I’ll be happy to index and publicize it. I’ve already done that with the film studies books mentioned upthread.)

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.”

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

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.

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.

My handy-dandy Minneapolis Public Library card allows me to access JSTOR, download of PDFs, etcetera

Well, whoop-dee-doo! I stand by my supposition that many non-academics are no so fortunate. In London, for example, as far as I am aware, none of the council lending libraries have JSTOR access. The British Library has it, but only on-site.

If remote access can be licensed by libraries for its users at a low cost then I suppose it is those libraries who should shoulder most of the blame for not doing so, but the lack of remote access to JSTOR at the BL (which does offer remote access to other resources) makes me wonder whether this mightn’t be because of licensing restrictions JSTOR imposes on them. PS. Downloading content from a library terminal onto a flash drive, as John suggests, would definitely not be permitted in many public libraries (eg. the British Library), I am pretty sure.

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?