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0 pointsrprasad13y ago0 comments

It's not a matter of restricting access to public knowledge; it's a matter of Aaron draining the village pool.

Information shares all of the downsides of the public commons: because it is freely available, no one wants to pay for the maintenance costs. JSTOR charges fees for access to cover the ongoing maintenance costs associated with storing access to thousands of journals and millions of articles published over several centuries. Note also that JSTOR provides assistance with locating articles relevant to the user's needs (i.e., library functions), and such services are frequently more valuable than its archival functions.

A wiki will not suffice to maintain access to this information; Wikipedia and Wikileaks have shown that. You would end up with all of the articles but no practical way to find the particular article or articles you are looking for.

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5 comments · 5 top-level

gnosis13y ago

"It's not a matter of restricting access to public knowledge; it's a matter of Aaron draining the village pool."

Copying documents does not destroy the original copies, so it does not drain anything.

"Information shares all of the downsides of the public commons: because it is freely available, no one wants to pay for the maintenance costs."

If JSTOR had made these documents freely available, there'd be plenty of people and organizations who'd gladly have paid for the maintenance costs. For example, archive.org.

"Note also that JSTOR provides assistance with locating articles relevant to the user's needs (i.e., library functions), and such services are frequently more valuable than its archival functions. ... A wiki will not suffice to maintain access to this information; Wikipedia and Wikileaks have shown that. You would end up with all of the articles but no practical way to find the particular article or articles you are looking for."

If anyone wanted to use those services, they could pay JSTOR for them regardless of whether these documents were also available elsewhere.

pekk13y ago

You can't have a tragedy of the commons when the commons belongs to one company. JSTOR isn't a village pool unless it's public, which it isn't.

JSTOR's charges aren't at all proportional to the hosting cost. If they were only charging for hosting then they should be happy if people share the data without using their servers, but they aren't, so it is manifest that they are charging for more than the hosting.

Indexing articles for browsing and search is not a real problem if the information is made public. If other people want to help JSTOR with this, they are not allowed to because JSTOR keeps all this publicly-funded information proprietary in perpetuity

betterunix13y ago

So according to your argument, the risk is not that we will be unable to access such articles without JSTOR, but that we will be unable to search for articles? That's basically saying that a document search system is too costly to create or maintain for a university library to deal with, and so JSTOR is necessary for queries. Which sounds like an unfounded assumption to me, considering how widely deployed CiteSeerX is.

Even if your argument were true, what exactly was Aaron draining? If JSTOR is providing this valuable search service, wouldn't that alone fund their operation? If having millions of documents is useless because we have no way to search those documents, what difference does it make if Aaron really had been sharing the documents with others? Would it not have been a good thing if Aaron had amassed these articles and made them available using a better search service -- wouldn't we have benefited (and isn't that the whole point of copyright anyway?)?

Had Aaron been accused of hacking into JSTOR to download the source code of their search system, you might have a point. Instead, he was accused of copyright infringement and of violating a network use agreement (because he was trying to evade the ban of his laptop's IP address); at no point was JSTOR's valuable search service even an issue in this case.

devcpp13y ago

Then Swartz was no threat. He was going to upload the articles to other people if he wanted to. He was going to have to provide the search tools.

I don't understand why they would "[secure] from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and [receive] confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed".

pms13y ago

There are already places for open-access articles, mainly PLOS and arXiv. PLOS stands for Public Library Of Science and was create around 10 years ago. It has got quite popular among scientist, and it's peer reviewed. However, it charges the authors with a small fee, usually around $1000 per article. For some scientists this is a problem. Personally I think this is a much better and a more economic systemic model than subscriptions. The subscription model unfortunately is pretty nasty (http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=890), to the point that thousands of scientists, and among them some renown geniuses, have decided to boycott it (http://thecostofknowledge.com). And now, with the death of Aaron there is one more reason to make the research articles free to the tax-payers, who in fact already fund the researchers, but somehow have to pay extra to access their results.

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