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0 pointspolitician13y ago0 comments

If you're really asking what I prefer, then I prefer making documents available gratis perhaps after the cost of digitizing them has been recouped. Some additional charge for the ongoing cost of storage and bandwidth would need to be worked out. However, $19 per article is unreasonable (c.f. Amazon S3 Requestor-Pays buckets $0.12/GiB).

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rayiner13y ago· 2 in thread

What do we know about JSTOR's cost structure? Is the $19 the result of subsidization within the system? I'd imagine there are a ton of articles on JSTOR which nobody ever reads, the digitization of which is subsidized by that of the popular articles. I'd also imagine that a la carte purchases subsidize subscriptions for universities. Also, the underlying content isn't necessarily free. Most of the popular journals charge subscription fees, and I'd imagine JSTOR doesn't get them all for free.

politicianOP13y ago

You've raised several points.

I grant that a $19 article may represent subsidization in their system, but argue that they have an ethical obligation derived from their position as a steward to make the components of that price transparent.

It's my understanding that universities pay significant amounts for site licenses and that general public purchases do not subsidize that access.

By perpetuating a watermark or attribution on a public domain work digitized by JSTOR, are we as a society not implicitly granting JSTOR a right on the work which it ought not have? Digitization is a one-time salvage operation. Should we conflate it with copyright through watermarks?

Regarding JSTOR, journals, and non-public-domain works -- that is a private property matter. They ought to be able to charge what the market will bear.

kanzure13y ago

    > It's my understanding that universities pay significant amounts for site
    > licenses and that general public purchases do not subsidize that access.

Yeah, I am pretty baffled with how non-institutional users are requested to pay for access, both on JSTOR and other publisher's sites. Surely this is not a large source of income? arXiv (always pointed out as a shining example of something going right) has recently started requesting membership fees to be paid by the top 200 institutional users. Other than that, the public is still able to go to the site and read about dark matter and substring bananas.

You know, what probably happened was that when the content was starting to get digitized, the publishers only had users that were accessing from universities. So they charged the universities just like they previously did for subscriptions to the bound book issues. At the time, there was probably no concept of doing any sort of analytics to figure out where downloads were coming from, so they didn't think that maybe they should just allow anyone to download, and then setup a deal with colleges to pay their fair share. I think the arXiv model is worth some more investigation..

(This ignores all the actual truths like, they have to maximize shareholder value, they have to make as much money as possible, their incentives are aligned differently, etc. Instead it is simply focusing on the reason why "individual purchase" is an option that doesn't seem to make sense to non-institutional members like the general public.)

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