Comment by DANmode
10 days ago
Comparatively few individuals are giving money to JSTOR these days.
Mostly institutions that they’ve previously captured.
And yes: not sure how you missed it, but for like a decade or more people have been scanning in millions of papers and books.
I don't know where people get the idea that JSTOR is one of the bad guys. It's a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access. It costs money to do that. What specifically have they done that you disapprove of?
I don’t know where you got the idea I was talking about my opinion of JSTOR.
Beats me what you're talking about, then. The literal answer to your original question is that people use SciHub and Library Genesis because they're free. But they're free because they infringe copyright. Maybe Swartz was opposed to copyright per se or maybe he was trying to make a point about free availability of journal articles associated with publicly funded research. Either way, JSTOR is the wrong target. JSTOR doesn't hold the copyright on those articles. JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access – which is exactly what Swartz seemed to be in favor of.
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