Volunteers. I did this type of volunteer work for hospitals and a museum when I was in high school. I didn't get paid for it but I still enjoyed it.

> Wikipedia is not comparable at all to JStor; one is targeted to the general public, the other is to researchers. There is a huge difference in the userbase.

Does it really matter who the target audiences are? They're both just publishing documents over a network. It's not like classified information or financial transactions, so there's not a huge difference. The only big difference between the two organizations is that one is open and more efficient while the other is not.

> Until a centralized distribution method is publicly funded as well, this is the way it has to work.

No it doesn't. All you need to do is free the publicly funded data. Who do you think Aaron was downloading the documents for? He was downloading them for another non-profit organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public.resource.org) that was willing to publish and host these documents themselves. JSTOR wouldn't have to pay for them to host it and people would have at the very least a backup for accessing this data. JSTOR isn't the only non-profit that has the capability of serving documents online.

I still haven't seen a good argument for keeping publicly funded research paper under a central paywall. It kills innovation, access, and it's inefficient.

imo a major reason Aaron was prosecuted, was because certain parties wanted to keep their paywall racket going without competition.