
JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles - FluidDjango
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/jstor-tests-free-read-only-access-to-some-articles/34908
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wnoise
I'd be quite surprised if they allowed write access.

(Yes, they mean "no downloads", but it's a rather ridiculous way of phrasing
that. And if you can read it, you can save it for later.)

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ameasure
LOL, that was my first reaction too. What if people did have write access
though? I guess it would just become another Wikipedia.

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drinian
What on earth does "read-online access" mean? Are they making people use some
kind of Flash application to read them (so you'll have to screencap important
stuff), or are they just blocking access to the PDFs?

I would continue by asking who on Earth let people with such poor technical
knowledge run a major academic publisher, but I have a funny story about an
internship several years ago at another academic publisher.

Circa 2005, IIRC, I sat in on a sales meeting where I was told that the
company was seriously considering requiring institutions to buy microfilm
copies of journals in order to get online access, as their margins were higher
on microfilm. Or something like that.

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hyperbovine
JSTOR is not a "major academic publisher" at all. It originally sprung up as a
consortium of University libraries who were looking for a way to digitize
decades of back-issues of old journals, which they could not afford to store
in hard copy any more. Now it's (I think) an independently operated nonprofit.
Like everything in the non-profit and academia sectors today, they are
resource constrained, so you should cut them some slack for not hiring 37
Signals to redesign their web interface.

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drinian
Thanks for clearing that up. They are a very different sort of organization
than the one behind my old summer job.

That being said, I don't really care what their Web interface looks like, but
the wording used in this press release is not related to reality, and that
bothers me.

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sgaither
I wondered if it was just a misunderstanding by the OP but it's the same
language on JSTOR's site: <http://about.jstor.org/rr>

>> "Register & Read Beta is a new, experimental program to offer _free, read-
online access_ to individual scholars..."

I dont think it's too geeky to point out that the use of "read-online access"
indicates a poor understanding of digital tech and rights management and the
web in general. Reminds me of the article posted the other day about how the
no-fly list might be circumventable with a DOM editor.

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michael_dorfman
Actually, I think it indicates a pretty good understanding of their target
audience. Although DRM can be circumvented by cutting and pasting, the hassle
of doing so on an academic article would soon reach the point where the
average academic would rather just pay the damn fee to download a copy.

At least I know I would, and I've paid a fair bit to JSTOR this past year...

