JSTOR is not a publisher. They are also a not-for-profit organization. While it would be awesome if all the material they scanned were open access, I think their hearts are probably in the right place. Scanning millions of journal articles isn't cheap, and there's no obvious alternative way to fund that.
There seems to be a world of difference between "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" in the ways we are imagining open-access.
JSTOR is not a publisher--agreed. They are, however, a central repository who charges an arm and a leg for research that, often, has been funded on the taxpayer's dime.
In my world, I guess I think of JSTOR as the "good guys." The trustees of its parent organization are real academics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITHAKA). Its fees are extraordinarily reasonable, at least compared to Elsevier's. (JSTOR fees for large U.S. universities are on the order of $10,000 annually, whereas my university says they pay about $2 million per year to Elsevier.) Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit, I don't really see where the money would go besides toward the actual cost of making the research publicly available (which in JSTOR's case is non-trivial, since they are scanning a lot of publications instead of converting InDesign files to PDFs).
There is obviously a difference between making academic research available to universities at reasonable prices and making academic research available to everyone for free. The latter is obviously better, but to happen, the money would have to come from somewhere. For a publisher, the obvious answer is publication fees (which is what PLoS does). This is not an option for JSTOR, since most of their material has already been published. I suspect that JSTOR would happily make everything in their collection open access if they had a sufficiently large endowment to do so.
> Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit, I don't really see where the money would go besides toward the actual cost of making the research publicly available (which in JSTOR's case is non-trivial, since they are scanning a lot of publications instead of converting InDesign files to PDFs).
I agree with your point. But you are ignoring another major expense that the fees go to:
Paying the actual publishers and rights-holders licensing fees. JSTor is not a publisher. Most of what they distribute, there is a copyright holder, usually the original publisher, that will not let them host and distribute without a fee.
This is obviously not something JStor has a whole lot of control over.
I agree that JStor are the 'good guys'; their fees are more reasonable than most of their for-profit competition, AND their service is _just plain better_ than most of their for-profit competition.
It would be interesting to see how much of JStor's budget goes to paying licensing fees to the rightsholders; I don't know if that information is public.
For the non-free content on JSTOR, I don't see much that another archive could do about it. The main issue is back issues of journals published between 1923 and now-ish. Future content could go open access directly online, in which case JSTOR doesn't even really enter into the picture. And JSTOR has already made all the older, public-domain content freely available. But in between, there is almost a century of copyrighted content controlled by the journals. JSTOR scans the paper journals, but can only make the PDFs available with agreement of the copyright holder. They could try to pressure them more, e.g. by threatening to evict journals from JSTOR if the journal doesn't agree to certain minimum licensing requirements. But they don't ultimately control that content themselves.
