On 9/11/07, daniwo59(a)aol.com
<daniwo59(a)aol.com> wrote:
Looking through dozens of articles, I find that
many link to journals that
are hosted on JSTOR. JSTOR is a fine repository of information, but it is
not
free. People researching from home do not have access to the articles that
are
cited, and are expected to pay to see them, unless they go to a
participating library, usually a university library. Very few other
people have access to
their collection.
The fact is that these are journal articles that can be found in most good
libraries in their paper format. They are then free and available to
everyone.
In fact, JSTOR is simply a pay-to-view library. Consider too that the
actual
source is the journal cited, not JSTOR per se.
As such, I would encourage peopl to link directly to the magazine that
contained the article, not the JSTOR collection which will charge to read
it. We
speak of free content and free images. I want to suggest that we expand
the
focus to free external links as well.
Well, minor nitpick: we're free as in speech, not free as in beer. :p
Anyhow, if this only applies to magazines/journals where a free equivalent
is available, I'm all for it. Otherwise, I think it's ridiculous - if no
free equivalent is available, we should use the best sources we've got,
regardless of whether we have to pay to access them. I've seen articles
citing subscription-only web sources have their references removed because
some editors were of the view that only sources you can freely view online
can be cited. (In such a case, I guess we should stop citing meatspace
newspapers we have to pay for.)
Johnleemk
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My view on it has been that if references of equal quality are
available, but some are free (gratis) and some paid, we should use the
free ones. If some free references are available, but superior paid ones
are out there, we should use both. And if nothing free is out there, we
shouldn't hesitate to use the paid ones. Sometimes, paid references are
the only ones out there, and those are still often accessible free
through a public library.