Re: <nettime> No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you

[h w <misterwarwick@yahoo.com>]

Greetings.
There's been discussion here on the Swartz JSTOR situation, and I would like to weigh in on this as it relates to topics I'm rather involved with right now.

Mr Smith pointed out that JSTOR is one of the "nicer" bunch of infogates, and for the most part he is correct. However, there are a few decidedly important failures in JSTOR and I would like to point them out.

1. you need to be "in school". There is no JSTOR for poverty stricken independent researchers. As libraries continue to close down, many are cutting what little access they have to systems like JSTOR from lack of funds. Furthermore, JSTOR limits access to libraries - only older articles are available publicly. If you are in prison, you are not getting to JSTOR.
2. Money is not money. The few times I actually paid for a JSTOR article it was about $15 for a short article. Note: 2,000,000,000 (2 billion) people live on less than a dollar day. A $15 article represents about 2 weeks total wages. 

And to complicate things, one Mr Maxwell caught wind of the Swartz prosecution and decided to release 30 gigs worth of scientific papers into the interweb thingie by way of thepiratebay and later BtGhost.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/22/2254204/Release-of-33GiB-of-Scientific-Publications

Here's the link to he BtGhost torrent:
http://www.btghost.com/link/89818739/

Mr Maxwell is especially focussed on documents prior to 1923. I have not been able to parse his torrent - I ran out of hard drive space...
:-/

Why JSTOR charges for Curie, Bohr, and Einstein, I have  no idea.

None of this addresses why there are infogates at all in academia, and it points at some very foundational points in the positions held by the various axia of the debate.

HW

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:20:33 -0400
From: Philip Smith <phlipsmith@gmail.com>
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for
??? you
Message-ID: <mailman.2.1311415200.20149.nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Of all the subscription databases out there JSTOR is among the least
proprietary and dick-ish. The cost to libraries is reasonable, the content
mostly historical (main subjects: literary criticism, history, economics,
business, philology; it's mostly a humanities collection). I doubt much of
 <...>


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