Comments on JSTOR's Register and Reading and Early Content: Register and Read and similar programs raise for me huge privacy flags. Libraries have gone to considerable efforts to ensure that the searching and reading behaviour of individual scholars is NOT tracked.
Register and Read looks more like a sales tactic for JSTOR's pay-per-view than a sincere attempt to move towards open access. Researchers can access a few articles, but if they want to be able to keep them on their hard drives and make full use of access under Register and Read, they must purchase a copy. In other words, it's only free if it's not all that useful, or the number of real free articles online is actually much, much smaller than what JSTOR portrays. Open access is literature that is digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (Suber, Overview). Register and Read does not remotely meet this definition. Kudos to JSTOR for releasing public domain content on September 6, 2011 (not long after Aaron Swartz downloaded JSTOR content). http://about.jstor.org/service/early-journal-content Suggestions for improvement: Link to the early journal content from the JSTOR main page - where it is, it is not easy to find. Work with journals to provide free access to back issues. The journals participating in Highwire Free are a good model. A large portion provide free access to back issues, often after one year: http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl As for Register and Read, I would suggest ignoring JSTOR altogether. Get in touch with the authors of articles you wish to read and ask them to put them in their institutional repository - the amount of work this would take wouldn't be much different, but there would be a world of difference in the results. best, Heather Morrison On 2013-01-14, at 8:59 AM, Omega Alpha | Open Access wrote: > JSTOR announces free limited reading access to its journal archive > <http://wp.me/p20y83-zK> > > I am an academic librarian at a small liberal arts college. I am committed, > within the confines of a finite library budget, to provide access to the most > relevant, highest quality information resources (journals, books, and media) > possible for our students and faculty. One important component of this access > commitment are the 11 Arts & Sciences collections and 1 Life Science > collection (over 1,600 titles) we subscribe to on the JSTOR full text journal > archive platform. ... > > In a press release dated January 9, 2013, JSTOR announced that following a > successful 10-month test, it is now expanding an experiment called Register & > Read, which will give anyone who signs up for a JSTOR account free online > reading access to up to three articles every two weeks in over 1,200 journals > "from nearly 800 scholarly societies, university presses, and academic > publishers" in the JSTOR archive. Affiliation with an academic institution is > not required. ... > > I'm sure they ran the numbers after the pilot to arrive at this figure. I'm > also sure they engaged in a Herculean effort to get buy-in from all the > publishers that agreed to join the program. I don't want to sound ungrateful. > It's a start. Maybe it's not the number of articles so much as the access > timeframe that feels particularly tight-fisted. Research activity is not > evenly spaced in time like this. If I'm doing research or working on a > writing project I need access to many sources in relatively short spurts of > time. Three articles every two weeks translates into 78 articles a year, 39 > articles every 6 months, or 20 (rounding-up from 19.5) articles every > quarter. What if JSTOR gave me the option of accessing up to 20 articles > every three months to use as I needed? That would have an entirely different > feel about it--more generous. It would make the Register & Read service > significantly more useful to independent scholars. > > I don't see Register & Read as a form of open access, though I grant it is a > step toward the opening of access. ... > > Gary F. Daught > Omega Alpha | Open Access > <http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com> > Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology > oa.openaccess @ gmail.com | @OAopenaccess > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "SPARC OA Forum" group. > To post to this group, send email to sparc-oafo...@arl.org > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > sparc-oaforum+unsubscr...@arl.org > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-oaforum _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
