[WikiEN-l] JSTOR and free external links

[Todd Allen]

John Lee wrote:
> 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
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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.

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