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Comment by foldr

10 days ago

JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives. That's useful to anyone who wants to read an old journal article without going to a physical library. I used to have to go to the library, dig out the relevant issue of Linguistic Inquiry, and photocopy it. Then in 2015, JSTOR started providing access to the entire scanned Linguistic Inquiry archive, so I could access all of those issues digitally.

I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.

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foldr

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DANmode  10 days ago

Public money does go to the costs of that.

That’s where most of the PDFs come from.

  • foldr  10 days ago

    Hmm, no. In the case of old print journal archives scanned by JSTOR, it's JSTOR paying the cost of the scanning.

DANmode  10 days ago

> JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives

So does SciHub.

  • foldr  10 days ago

    SciHub mainly redistributes scans of print archives made by JSTOR and other organisations. And it does not have everything that JSTOR has. For example, this paper is not, as far as I can tell, available on SciHub:

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178697

    Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place:

    https://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-and-apex-covantage-mark-2...

    • DANmode  10 days ago

      Are you being intentionally obtuse?

      If the JSTOR copy didn’t exist, the pre-print copy would be scraped from the author’s website,

      or the text / results submitted by the author or someone close anonymously.

      Less, more slowly, but the same point.

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