Just a note that anyone interested in the issues of intellectual property and the Internet could usefully look at JSTOR: A history by Roger Schonfeld. JSTOR was the first big attempt to put complete series of academic journals (including back issues) online and free[1]. Despite a lot of missteps, JSTOR survived and prospered while well-funded commercial ventures failed. I’m pleased to say the economics profession played a prominent role, with the American Economic Review, Econometrica and others being among the early participants.
The success of JSTOR is an illustration of the proposition, put forward most clearly by Clay Shirky that the economics of the Internet favour the free provision of content by those seeking fame (taken generally to include anyone who has something to say and wants others to read it) over fee-based content created by those seeking fortune.
fn1. Quite a few commentators have pointed out that JSTOR isn’t free or easily accessible to individuals, though it is non-profit and the charges for library subscriptions are modest – less than a single commercial journal in many cases.
{ 27 comments }
Brian Weatherson 04.14.04 at 11:58 am
What is the sense in which JSTOR is free? I can access it through my Brown account, but if I just go to a random computer I can’t get to it. To be sure, most people who want to use JSTOR will be members of a subscribing institution, but that’s not the same thing as being free.
By the way, the coolest thing about JSTOR, and one that several people don’t realise, is that you can do full-text searches using it. It’s kinda bizarre that you can do this since you can’t do text searches of the articles you download, but somewhere there’s an insanely big database with the text of all those journals stored and indexed. I guess the book will say something about how they got all that text in in the first place.
John Quiggin 04.14.04 at 12:16 pm
You’re right Brian – nonprofit is what I should have said. In referring to it being free, I meant that none of the content providers get anything, although the subscribing institutions have to cover the costs of the service.
Abiola Lapite 04.14.04 at 1:31 pm
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“To be sure, most people who want to use JSTOR will be members of a subscribing institution, but that’s not the same thing as being free.”
Indeed. Perhaps the single most annoying thing about JSTOR is that one has to be a member of a subscribing institution to make use of it. Sending would-be individual subscribers off to subscribe to the home pages of the various publishers who make their content available by JSTOR is simply ridiculous.
The conceit with JSTOR seems to be that only those who are attached to academic institutions could possibly have any legitimate interest in keeping up with current developments in scholarly literature. I’ll take arXiv and CiteSeer as examples of openness over the likes of JSTOR and NBER any day of the week.
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antirealist 04.14.04 at 2:15 pm
In referring to it being free, I meant that none of the content providers get anything, although the subscribing institutions have to cover the costs of the service.
But the content providers are getting paid, aren’t they? My understanding is that the institution has to subscribe to any journal accessed through JSTOR. So in what sense is JSTOR’s success an illustration of the fact that “the economics of the Internet favour the free provision of content by those seeking fame … over fee-based content created by those seeking fortune?”
Nat Whilk 04.14.04 at 3:09 pm
Free? Jeepers, doesn’t Crooked Timber do any fact-checking?
George Williams 04.14.04 at 3:42 pm
Why not read JSTOR’s about pages? I hope that content providers are getting something. Otherwise, where are all those participation fees going? That’s an awful lot of money to “cover the costs of the service.”
Matt Weiner 04.14.04 at 4:02 pm
JSTOR discusses the text vs. pdf question here. Apparently they scan the articles using OCR software to create the searchable text, but they display them as images because that’s more accurate than the text generated (among other reasons).
Brian Weatherson 04.14.04 at 4:22 pm
Matt, that’s a useful link, but I don’t think they really answer the question.
You can display things more or less as images with text search capacity. Compare this version of Lewis’s _Causal Explanation_ that Branden Fitelson made up. It’s clearly just as accurate as a picture, but it’s got search capacity built in.
I don’t really use scanners so I’ve got no idea how the technology works here, but I think JSTOR are at best a fair way behind the curve on this one.
George Williams 04.14.04 at 4:57 pm
While I’m not ready to celebrate their accomplishment, to say that JSTOR is behind the curve in its technical procedures is incorrect.
There are two ways of creating a PDF:
1) You scan an image and save it as a PDF.
2) You convert a document created in a word processor into a PDF document.
The second of these is “understood” by the computer as text, thus it’s searchable. The first of these is just an image and cannot be searched as text until computing tools become a lot more sophisticated.
The procedure followed by JSTOR is the same procedure followed by The Making of America Project. Scan the archival documents and do a rough OCR on them, then make the images available while allowing the user to search full-text on the digital text that results from the rough OCR. Accurate digital text is more desirable, but correcting a rough OCR is very time consuming and thus expensive. When projects have thousands upon thousands of pages, they have often decided to go with this compromise.
The procedure is not without its critics. See, for example, Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.
For background information on the technical details, see “Chapter 3: Digitization — Scanning, OCR, and Re-keying” in Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice by Alan Morrison, Michael Popham, Karen Wikander.
Walt Pohl 04.14.04 at 7:29 pm
JSTOR is evil. JSTOR may in fact be Satan in disguise. JSTOR has done more than anything else to prevent the free flow of information out of universities. The worst part of JSTOR is the way it makes academics forget that it’s _not_ free, just free for _them_.
Another Damned Medievalist 04.14.04 at 7:36 pm
Ok, folks — there are far too many people commenting on the color of Napolean’s underwear here. Point — JSTOR is great for anyone doing research in a large number of academic fields. Point — JSTOR, while not free to institutions or individual users in terms of subscriptions, 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 (This is true everywhere I’ve lived — perhaps it varies by state, but I don’t think so).
George Williams 04.14.04 at 8:04 pm
John Quiggins’ original post reads as follows: “The success of JSTOR is an illustration of the proposition, put forward most clearly by Clay Shirky that the economics of the Internet favour the free provision of content by those seeking fame (taken generally to include anyone who has something to say and wants others to read it) over fee-based content created by those seeking fortune.”
I don’t think JSTOR is at all an illustration of this proposition. Users pay a fee to access this information, either as individual subscribers, as taxpayers, or students paying tuition. Those who wrote the original material have no say in how or where the material is made available on JSTOR, so it can’t be concluded that the authors are more interested in one thing (fame) over another (fortune). The authors, in fact, are not involved in the JSTOR process.
Putting aside the “JSTOR: good or bad?” debate, in what way are the above comments taking issue with Quiggins’ statement an example of “people commenting on the color of Napolean’s underwear”?
antirealist 04.14.04 at 8:39 pm
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.
Walt Pohl 04.14.04 at 9:06 pm
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?
Nat Whilk 04.14.04 at 9:12 pm
Walt, what are you referring to when you mention “truly free access” to the latest research in mathematics?
John Quiggin 04.14.04 at 9:31 pm
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.
anand sarwate 04.14.04 at 10:05 pm
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.
Joel 04.15.04 at 7:12 am
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.
DJW 04.15.04 at 7:49 am
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).
djw 04.15.04 at 7:53 am
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?
George Williams 04.15.04 at 1:33 pm
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.”
Cathy 04.15.04 at 3:49 pm
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.
Another Damned Medievalist 04.15.04 at 4:54 pm
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.
George Williams 04.15.04 at 5:24 pm
“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).
Another Damned Medievalist 04.15.04 at 6:55 pm
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.
Another Damned Medievalist 04.16.04 at 1:15 am
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.
Kerim Friedman 04.16.04 at 4:47 pm
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….
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