WorkInProgress
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http://news.yahoo.com/what-we-learn...-004332081.html;_ylt=A2KJ3CdNgfRQwUAAPLbQtDMD
If you asked me to guess what act of militant civil disobedience a young man got in trouble for, got into so much trouble that he would commit suicide rather than face the possible jail time, and has since gained the title of martyr, no matter how many free guesses you allowed me, I would never think to conjecture that he would martyr himself for the cause of making academic journal articles available for free to the public. Put another way, if you told me that this martyr had gotten in trouble for hacking into a corporate databank and downloading tons of intellectual property, no matter how many guesses you allowed me, it would never occur to me to think of J-STOR.
It's not because I haven't heard of J-STOR. On the contrary: Not only have I heard of J-STOR but I get materials from it all the time. It's because I know J-STOR as well as I do that it baffles me that a committed, fanatical young hacker would concentrate so much energy there. How can I best describe the cause that he died for? He died so that people who were being mildly inconvenienced might be slightly less inconvenienced, in the conduct of their academic research. And indeed, academic research is what people use J-STOR for. They don't use it when they want something light and entertaining to read.
If you want to subscribe to J-STOR from your home, it's expensive--very expensive. Does this mean that Aaron Swartz was taking something that was expensive and making it free? Actually, no. The main subscribers to J-STOR are not private individuals, but libraries. The bigger the library, the larger the selection of academic journals it will have from J-STOR and a number of other databases. Therefore: If you have access to a library that subscribes to J-STOR, you can get on a computer and download journal articles to your heart's content--for free.
Now, I'm not about to say that it's equally easy for everybody. If you live in New York City, you have it made: Go to the New York Public Library (I think it's true at any branch though I could be mistaken), and on either your laptop or one of the library computers with your flash drive, you have a gold mine of journal articles available to you from J-STOR and various other databases. I'm not guessing at this: I do it all the time. (On a side note, if anybody reading this post needs a particular academic journal article, just let me know, I can probably get it for you.) The same is true if you're at a large, well-endowed university library. (How much it's open to the general public differs from one to another.) And if you're not in such an opportune location, inter-library loan can usually help you. And now that most journal articles are digitized, it's not even as if somebody has to copy it for you page by page and charge you.
Furthermore, most people who use journal articles do have some kind of collegiate affiliation, and that includes acquaintances they can ask to help them obtain what they need. There's a particular article that I found out about today. First, I'm going to see if it's online at the New York Public Library. I'll be there tomorrow. If it's not, there's a grad student at Hopkins in Baltimore whom I knew when I was a patron of that library who will gladly get it from there and send it to me--effortlessly.
It's significant that J-STOR didn't want to prosecute him, while MIT, whose computers he hacked, did. J-STOR doesn't have anything to worry about: they make their money from library subscriptions, and nothing Swartz was doing was going to cause even one library to say, "Hey, we don't need to subscribe to J-STOR, we'll just tell our patrons to get their articles from Aaron Swartz!" It's different with MIT: he actually broke into a closet that wasn't for the general public, and hooked his equipment up to theirs. Colleges do have a way of getting touchy about people coming in and hacking into their computers. It wasn't the intellectual property of the articles they were concerned about; it was the physical property of their computers.
Incidentally, in follow-up to telling you that J-STOR makes its money from subscriptions to libraries, let me add that there is no other money to be made from the existence of journal articles. The journals themselves are published by professional societies whose members are mostly professors and graduate students--the American Sociological Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Mathematical Society--and these societies get all their revenues from dues and donations, with dues-paying members automatically subscribed to their journals. Nothing Aaron Swartz did would have cost them a penny. And the authors of those articles? You'll never guess how much money an author gets paid for a journal article. ZERO! That's right. Scholars publish in these journals for prestige in their fields, not for money. So nothing Aaron Swartz was doing would cost them a penny either.
But the big thing is, if you want to get a copy of a journal article for free, it's not all that hard to do. You go to the nearest big library, and if you don't have a big library nearby, you go to the nearest library that has an inter-library loan service. And most people who want journal articles have other connections that will help them also. So this is why I say, Aaron Swartz gave his life so that people who were being mildly inconvenienced in their efforts to get academic journal articles for free would be slightly less inconvenienced. And for all that, speaking as a user of the goods, I just have to say, thank you, Aaron, I guess...but WHY?
If you asked me to guess what act of militant civil disobedience a young man got in trouble for, got into so much trouble that he would commit suicide rather than face the possible jail time, and has since gained the title of martyr, no matter how many free guesses you allowed me, I would never think to conjecture that he would martyr himself for the cause of making academic journal articles available for free to the public. Put another way, if you told me that this martyr had gotten in trouble for hacking into a corporate databank and downloading tons of intellectual property, no matter how many guesses you allowed me, it would never occur to me to think of J-STOR.
It's not because I haven't heard of J-STOR. On the contrary: Not only have I heard of J-STOR but I get materials from it all the time. It's because I know J-STOR as well as I do that it baffles me that a committed, fanatical young hacker would concentrate so much energy there. How can I best describe the cause that he died for? He died so that people who were being mildly inconvenienced might be slightly less inconvenienced, in the conduct of their academic research. And indeed, academic research is what people use J-STOR for. They don't use it when they want something light and entertaining to read.
If you want to subscribe to J-STOR from your home, it's expensive--very expensive. Does this mean that Aaron Swartz was taking something that was expensive and making it free? Actually, no. The main subscribers to J-STOR are not private individuals, but libraries. The bigger the library, the larger the selection of academic journals it will have from J-STOR and a number of other databases. Therefore: If you have access to a library that subscribes to J-STOR, you can get on a computer and download journal articles to your heart's content--for free.
Now, I'm not about to say that it's equally easy for everybody. If you live in New York City, you have it made: Go to the New York Public Library (I think it's true at any branch though I could be mistaken), and on either your laptop or one of the library computers with your flash drive, you have a gold mine of journal articles available to you from J-STOR and various other databases. I'm not guessing at this: I do it all the time. (On a side note, if anybody reading this post needs a particular academic journal article, just let me know, I can probably get it for you.) The same is true if you're at a large, well-endowed university library. (How much it's open to the general public differs from one to another.) And if you're not in such an opportune location, inter-library loan can usually help you. And now that most journal articles are digitized, it's not even as if somebody has to copy it for you page by page and charge you.
Furthermore, most people who use journal articles do have some kind of collegiate affiliation, and that includes acquaintances they can ask to help them obtain what they need. There's a particular article that I found out about today. First, I'm going to see if it's online at the New York Public Library. I'll be there tomorrow. If it's not, there's a grad student at Hopkins in Baltimore whom I knew when I was a patron of that library who will gladly get it from there and send it to me--effortlessly.
It's significant that J-STOR didn't want to prosecute him, while MIT, whose computers he hacked, did. J-STOR doesn't have anything to worry about: they make their money from library subscriptions, and nothing Swartz was doing was going to cause even one library to say, "Hey, we don't need to subscribe to J-STOR, we'll just tell our patrons to get their articles from Aaron Swartz!" It's different with MIT: he actually broke into a closet that wasn't for the general public, and hooked his equipment up to theirs. Colleges do have a way of getting touchy about people coming in and hacking into their computers. It wasn't the intellectual property of the articles they were concerned about; it was the physical property of their computers.
Incidentally, in follow-up to telling you that J-STOR makes its money from subscriptions to libraries, let me add that there is no other money to be made from the existence of journal articles. The journals themselves are published by professional societies whose members are mostly professors and graduate students--the American Sociological Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Mathematical Society--and these societies get all their revenues from dues and donations, with dues-paying members automatically subscribed to their journals. Nothing Aaron Swartz did would have cost them a penny. And the authors of those articles? You'll never guess how much money an author gets paid for a journal article. ZERO! That's right. Scholars publish in these journals for prestige in their fields, not for money. So nothing Aaron Swartz was doing would cost them a penny either.
But the big thing is, if you want to get a copy of a journal article for free, it's not all that hard to do. You go to the nearest big library, and if you don't have a big library nearby, you go to the nearest library that has an inter-library loan service. And most people who want journal articles have other connections that will help them also. So this is why I say, Aaron Swartz gave his life so that people who were being mildly inconvenienced in their efforts to get academic journal articles for free would be slightly less inconvenienced. And for all that, speaking as a user of the goods, I just have to say, thank you, Aaron, I guess...but WHY?
