[WikiEN-l] Millions for salaries, not one cent for defense

[Mark]

On 7/21/11 10:59 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> On 21 July 2011 21:19, David Gerard<dgerard at 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