Comment by DANmode
5 days ago
> I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history.
For certain sciences, 36 years is two lifetimes. Like I said: we’re talking past each other due to our research needs.
We're talking past each other because you only care about your own research needs and apparently can't see any value in opening access to documents which other researchers might need. I am not a historian, but even so, it's not lost on me that a historian might want to access some old documents. Just because you think that JSTOR isn't useful to you personally (though, I can guarantee that your 'robots' have been trained on it) doesn't mean that it's not serving a useful function to the academic research community as a whole.
One can imagine the quality of research in fields where researchers can't be bothered to read anything that wasn't published in the last five minutes, and rely on other people's partial and possibly inaccurate summaries of key results. But that is another topic.