Comment by foldr
8 days ago
So, this discussion started with me saying that:
> [JSTOR is] a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access
You'd think that would pretty obviously include the vast swathes of material published before the internet and PDF preprints were a thing (and the considerable amount of subsequent research that just never got uploaded to anyone's website, for whatever reason).
Okay, so why can’t the volunteers scanning for Anna’s Archive perform this again?
Why does it need to be technically centralized and politically weak?
Anna's Archive is primarily a meta search engine. I see that they've put out a call for volunteers, but I don't think any significant part of their archive consists of volunteer scans.
As to your 'why' question, we're talking about boring, thankless work that in many cases breaks the law. It's not exactly surprising that we don't see millions of people signing up to do it for free!
I don't understand your second paragraph.
I simply don’t see JSTOR outlasting (as an organization, or a technology/archive) individual contributors and torrent trackers.
Solution which does not require millions of people =]
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