1) Some of the articles on JSTOR are the product of complete public funding. But many are not. Many are the result of partial or complete university funding.
2) All the work of editing the underlying journals, which is very time consuming, is generally not publicly funded.
3) All of the work of digitizing those journal articles is not free. When Google undertakes to digitize such content, they charge you by selling your privacy to others. JSTOR just asks you to pay a fee for their service. Who is the bad guy here?
The universities are not paid by the journals, — quite the opposite: they pay handsomely for access the work of their own researchers.
In most cases the journals are edited by the same people who write for them, for free (sometimes there'll be a pittance salary, but it's not enough to quit your day job by any means).
The "incomprehensible gibberish" is, in general, fully comprehensible by their intended audience, which is other academics working in the same field.
Here's how the model works:
1) Academic writes the article, supported by taxpayer funding, or a grant from a foundation, or whatever. 2) Academic submits the article to the journal, where it is peer-reviewed and edited by other academics. 3) None of these academics get paid a cent for their work (other than the aforementioned public funding). In specific, the journal publisher doesn't pay them anything. Some of them even CHARGE the author. 4) The journal publisher then sells the result for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year.
Nice gig for the publishers. Less so for the academics and the taxpayers.
This model made a certain degree of sense back when journals had to be printed (short print runs are expensive, especially stuff with lots of diagrams, weird equations, foreign languages, etc. as journal articles tend to be), then physically distributed by paper mail to institutions all over the world.
That's no longer the case.
Yes, 34$ for a 20 page PDF. I could get printed books with collections of 15-20 hand picked articles for less. The obscenity is related to the huge & itemized price.
Also, if you are not a student at one of the affiliated universities (which is a rare case, probably less than 1% of the population) then you get no good options. How is that for advancing the arts and sciences?
How about we get all that has been funded by the public back to the public, and stop this madness.
Another problem is lack of access to the text for machine learning, NLP purposes.
In conclusion, I get they invested some money. They should just be nationalized. Pay them a compensation fee and just cut them out of the loop. They are an obstacle to progress.
It is one of those times when public good trumps individual property rights. Back in the time when they were building railroads in USA, it was necessary to solve a similar problem - how could they pass the railroad through the maze of public properties. The solution is simple - expropriation + fair compensation. Public good must be met first.
