They are more than an archive. They impose a very hefty surcharge on their own account, beyond what they need pay for licensing the backfiles from the publishers. They spent the money very usefully in the past: they have scanned and archived hundreds of thousands of pages print journals at a time nobody else was doing it sand no electronic backfiles existed, themselves developing the technology. They continue to archive additional print publications--but since there are so many people prepared to use what is now a mature technology without charging anybody for it, perhaps this role is no longer essential.
And making available backfiles that publishers have already digitized costs very little by comparison. But their publishers are by and large not profit-making commercial enterprises: they are primarily scholarly societies, some of them prosperous, but most very precariously funded themselves. On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Steven Walling <swall...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling <swall...@wikimedia.org> > wrote: >> >> They do not have access to them, because they are unaffiliated scholars. >> Dozens of editors want access to this content,[1] but can't have it because >> JSTOR locks it down. > > > A friend pointed out to me offlist that there is a slight error in my > statement which merits correcting: JSTOR is not necessarily to blame here, > since they are simply an archive, and have to fit in with how journal > publishers license their content. > > So FWIW, the real solution probably starts with open access journals like > those published by PLoS. Wikipedia could do a lot more to encourage use of > the the open access content that already is available. > > -- > Steven Walling > https://wikimediafoundation.org/ > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
