On 7/21/11 10:59 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 21 July 2011 21:19, David
Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Indeed. But everyone would be happier if JSTOR
stopped trying to
enclose the public domain.
The *Royal Society* are the ones trying to enclose the
public domain.
JSTOR host the scans and provide the metadata to make it usable.
[...] Yes, this content being open would be a wonderful thing, but I
honestly think we're at risk of identifying the wrong villain if we
keep insisting that JSTOR qua JSTOR are evil and must be brought to
heel. The Google Books approach suggests a way we could get release of
the material to work, but it's the RS we'd need to engage with to get
it to work. There's very little benefit I can see to be gained by
chasing JSTOR here, and a real risk of poisoning the waters for future
cooperation.
I agree that JSTOR aren't the only ones at fault, but my interactions
with them have generally not given the impression that they're
interested in serving the public domain, either. If anything, they have
a very protective attitude towards "their" database, taking a more
aggressive stance than many of the journals who actually own the content
in question. They've been completely uninterested in developing any sort
of free-access policies, despite the fact that, from what I know from at
least one journal, some journals would in fact make some of their old
content freely available through JSTOR, if JSTOR offered that as an
option that they could choose--- something like the NYTimes, "pre-1923
free, post-1923 pay" archive policy. But JSTOR doesn't even allow a
journal to mark any portion of their archive non-paywalled, much less
actually push for anything like that.
In fact, they even bargain fairly stingily when it comes to temporary
and partially free access. For example, the "19th Century British
Pamphlets" collection was scanned thanks to a public research grant,
which as a condition required JSTOR to give free access to all UK
educational institutions through 2019. But they wouldn't agree to make
it completely free, or to offer free access for more than 10 years;
that's JSTOR's unwillingness to let go of control over their archive,
the funding body did not demand a 2019 sunset for free access, or the
restrictions on who could access it.
I hope you're right that they can be encouraged to engage in more
productive collaboration in the future, but for my part I'm hugely
disappointed and disillusioned with them. At one point in the late-90s
it seemed like they might become something of a larger-scale Perseus
Project, balancing a need for continued funding of their project with a
mission of digitizing humanity's common heritage and making it freely
available online. But I haven't seen any evidence of their leadership
having that kind of vision.
-Mark