'This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR. Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
...When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource - where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)
But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers. As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction - scanning the documents - created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.
In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.'
--User:Gmaxwell, http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactio...
'We're projecting today that 2010-11 revenue will have increased 49% from 2009-10 actuals, to $23.8 million. Spending is projected to have increased 103% from 2009-10 actuals, to $18.5 million. This means we added $5.3 million to the reserve, for a projected end-of-year total of $19.5 million which represents 8.3 months of reserves at the 2011-12 spending level.
...We started the year with an ambitious plan to grow the Wikimedia Foundation staff 82% from 50 to 91 and a decision to, if necessary, sacrifice speed for quality (“hiring well rather than hiring quickly”). We expect to end the year with staff of 78, representing an increase over 2009-10 of 56%.'
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foun...
On 21 July 2011 17:52, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
'This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical
The watermark is in a separate PDF layer, so is trivially removable before upload.
I have just suggested on internal-l that someone give JSTOR a call, giving them the chance to look good by releasing this stuff themselves. Given that US law is utterly and unambiguously against them having *any* control via copyright over this stuff, no matter what silly deals they may or may not have signed with the Royal Society.
(I'd be uploading them myself now except I'm in the UK, where the copyright situation surrounding slavish copies of PD works is still in a state of quantum uncertainty.)
- d.
On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 3:03 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I have just suggested on internal-l that someone give JSTOR a call, giving them the chance to look good by releasing this stuff themselves. Given that US law is utterly and unambiguously against them having *any* control via copyright over this stuff, no matter what silly deals they may or may not have signed with the Royal Society.
Any action here would be in contract (for breach of the terms and conditions), not in copyright.
On 21 July 2011 20:28, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 3:03 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I have just suggested on internal-l that someone give JSTOR a call, giving them the chance to look good by releasing this stuff themselves. Given that US law is utterly and unambiguously against them having *any* control via copyright over this stuff, no matter what silly deals they may or may not have signed with the Royal Society.
Any action here would be in contract (for breach of the terms and conditions), not in copyright.
Indeed. But everyone would be happier if JSTOR stopped trying to enclose the public domain.
It would be nice for various purposes if this question didn't come up, but events are well ahead of any such blissful state of undecidedness. I expect quite a few uploads of public domain content from JSTOR in reasonably short order. The only thing is that every uploader needs to check every scan for JSTOR additions or manipulations that may be intended to claim a new copyright. (Though this would arguably involve misstatement on JSTOR's part that the document was actually what they claimed it was.)
- d.
On 21 July 2011 21:19, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Any action here would be in contract (for breach of the terms and conditions), not in copyright.
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.
Their line, I understand it, is that copyright clearance and so forth rests with the contributing institutions and not with themselves. Google Books take a similar stance; they pro-actively released a swathe of PD material, but if you want to get something additional released as released you need to sort it out with the "responsible" library and then it'll get regraded. (Or this was the situation when I helped someone fill in the forms a few years back, anyway.)
There has been at least one occasion where JSTOR have hosted a journal and later partially pulled it because it turned out the contributing publishers didn't own the rights to some issues, so they do occasionally do active involvement when rights are challenged. (The Google analogy breaks down here...)
In this case, note the copyright statement:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/102295 - "Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775) © 1695 The Royal Society"
Compare, for example:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40107566 - "The International History Review © 1996 Taylor & Francis, Ltd."
One of these claims is obviously more defensible than the other, but note that they're both third-party. JSTOR no more claims the copyright than Amazon claims to own the copyright to Kindle editions.
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.
On 7/21/11 10:59 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 21 July 2011 21:19, David Gerarddgerard@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
On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
But I haven't seen any evidence of their leadership having that kind of vision.
Fun facts: according to their 2009 IRS filing*, their income was $53 million. $23 million went to JSTOR employee salaries/compensation. The president makes >$500,000 and the executive vice president >$320,000; I'd list the various other managers making >$200k, but there's like 10 of them.
The expenses section is quite fascinating.
- IT in general costs them no more than $4.3m - They spent $1m on 'travel' and another $312k on 'Conferences, conventions, and meetings' - "journal acquisition & scan" costs $4.8m - "NITLE TRANSFER"** costs $4.4m - "fees & publisher payments"*** cost $8.3m
* http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2009/133/857/2009-133857105-06a32823-9... linked from http://www2.guidestar.org/organizations/13-3857105/ithaka-harbors.aspx# ** 'title transfer'? Have no idea what this is. Hopefully such a colossal sum is buying something worth buying, like copyright to entire journals and it's just a misleading label. *** Am I reading this Form 990 right? Are they *really* spending 3 times more on their employees than is going to the publishers, or they spend on *all* their technical initiatives, scanning and servers and all? I am reminded of the WMF budget.
On 22 July 2011 02:21, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
But I haven't seen any evidence of their leadership having that kind of vision.
Fun facts: according to their 2009 IRS filing*, their income was $53 million. $23 million went to JSTOR employee salaries/compensation. The president makes >$500,000 and the executive vice president >$320,000; I'd list the various other managers making >$200k, but there's like 10 of them.
I've just been doing the same figures, albeit focusing on 2008:
http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/
In short:
- the "joining fee" is a bit over the ongoing journal scanning costs, but not dramatically so - the annual fee then gets split 30% publishers, 70% JSTOR
JSTOR merged with another body in 2009, so the 2009 figures include some of its overhead and operations - the JSTOR-project-specific staff cost, for example, seems to be a good bit lower judging by 2007/8 data. I've used 2008 data to try and correct for this.
The one detail that really leapt out at me was how few once-off individual users there are. Total income from "pay per view articles" in 2008 was under $150k - perhaps representing seven or eight thousand articles - and dropped to half that in 2009. Given how ubiquitous JSTOR access is at academic institutions, it makes sense that it would be rarely used, but still.
** 'title transfer'? Have no idea what this is. Hopefully such a colossal sum is buying something worth buying, like copyright to entire journals and it's just a misleading label.
It didn't appear the year before, and I suspect may be something to do with the merger & corresponding transfer of assets.
*** Am I reading this Form 990 right? Are they *really* spending 3 times more on their employees than is going to the publishers, or they spend on *all* their technical initiatives, scanning and servers and all? I am reminded of the WMF budget.
My interpretation here is that the IT costs may be purely "physical" and not include the development staff - the depreciation figures seem too high to make sense otherwise. There's no staff breakdown, though.