On 12/20/08, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that most conventional publishers will permit the Foundation to re-sell their articles at anything less than their own list price, which is often as high as $40 per article. (that's what this amounts to) -- or for a flat rate to provide access to anyone who gets a Wikipedia account.
Access to anyone with a wikipedia account would never fly-- that's essentially asking them to offer it to anyone with internet access.
But getting access to our admins, our users who have acheived a certain edit count, or have some other well-defined criteria wouldn't be much different from a university library giving access to all enrolled students.
Also a plus-- Wikipedia's content editors are, I think, by a large, usually in academia. Our editors tend to be disproportionately college-aged or college-affiliated. That means that many or most of the people we would be buying the service for already have it, and so would represent pure profit to JSTOR (or whomever).
Alec