[WikiEN-l] JSTOR and free external links

[John Lee]

On 9/11/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at 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