JSTOR Opens Up U.S. Journal Content From Before 1923

September 7, 2011, 1:28 pm

Users anywhere now have free access to JSTOR’s Early Journal Content, a corpus of scholarly articles published in the United States before 1923 and elsewhere before 1870. That’s about 500,000 articles from 200 journals, according to JSTOR’s announcement.

The digital archive said it encourages “broad use” of the material but asked that users not use “robots or other devices to systematically download these works as this may be disruptive to our systems.” In the announcement, Laura Brown, JSTOR’s managing director, said the move was not prompted by a much-publicized incident this year involving Aaron Swartz, a hacktivist charged with violations related to making unauthorized downloads of millions of JSTOR files.

“We are taking this step as part of our continuous effort to provide the widest possible access to the content on JSTOR while ensuring the long-term preservation of this important material,” Ms. Brown wrote. “We considered whether to delay or accelerate this action, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations. In the end, we decided to press ahead with our plans to make the Early Journal Content available, which we believe is in the best interest of our library and publisher partners, and students, scholars, and researchers everywhere.”

This entry was posted in Open Access, Publishing, Research. Bookmark the permalink.

http://www.facebook.com/char.mentor Char Psi Tutor Mentor

Thank you!!! What a fabulous resource~ I sharing with my networks now
jabberwocky12

All articles before 1923 and 1870! Wow! That will certainly open the doors of science to those who currently can’t afford it. I hope their servers can cope with the demand that will undoubtedly occur!
mjw13

Geeze, jabberwocky12. Just ’cause scientists may not want old articles doesn’t mean that other scholars may not want access!
pennyu

Actually, for historians these are invaluable resources, some of them based on manuscript and other rare documents. This is great news for anyone whose work has historical depth.
walkerst

I simply don’t believe the claim that this had nothing to do with Mr. Swartz. They can say what they want, but in my personal opinion, it just doesn’t ring true. JSTOR is not a for-profit publisher, but they had certainly not been making early work available for free in the past.

And yes, it isn’t going to help current scientists, but a) much of the material in JSTOR is not in the sciences, though some is; b) even for sciences, there are history of medicine scholars. JSTOR is not primarily known as a scientific publisher, because even their ‘current’ material is 2-5 years old, with moving embargo walls. They have always been an aggregator of historical materials. So the comment by jabberwocky 12 just shows an ignorance of the nature of JSTOR.
jabberwocky12

I didn’t claim that JSTOR is a publisher at all: it is well-known known as a Journal STORage system of stuff published elsewhere.

Secondly, all they have done is make 6% of their stuff available – almost all of it is in the public domain anyway. (I’m not saying that is nothing, but it’s hardly something to write home about). They have plenty more material in the public domain, and they are not making that available, and have no plans to do so.

I used the sciences as an example, but even people working in the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, commerce, law, languages, etc., need material more recent than 90 years. As for the history of medicine (or history in general) scholars, they will need to access material produced within the last 100 years. That said, the sciences, like most of the disciplines, have a fair representation in JSTOR. So, my opinion remains that the impact on most fields, science among them, is unlikely to be much at all.

You can criticize me for a different opinion on the value of this 6%, but your inference that my view is based on ignorance indicates a character trait that you might not wish to display in public.
xinyilaola

sorry about that.