JSTOR: What is it Good For?

Swartz is facing 35 years behind bars for allegedly cracking JSTOR. (Photo: Demand Progress)

Information-liberation guru and alleged hacktivist Aaron Swartz is facing 35 years in prison on a federal indictment [PDF] for breaking into MIT's systems and downloading more than four million academic articles from JSTOR. So, I can't help but see Stuart Buck's point that his doing so wasn't a good idea.

But is JSTOR a good idea?

JSTOR is a non-profit organization that digitizes scholarship and makes it available online – for a fee. JSTOR was launched by the philanthropic Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1995 to serve the public interest. But it seems to me that today, JSTOR may be more mischievous than munificent.

For instance, on JSTOR I found a 1907 article called "Criminal Appeal in England" published in the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation. I was offered the opportunity to view this 11-page antique for the dear price of $34.00. And this is despite the fact that my university is a JSTOR "participating institution," and despite the fact that this article is so old, it is no longer subject to copyright.

What's more, by paying $34.00, I would take on some rather severe limitations under JSTOR's terms of service. I could not, for instance, turn around and make this public-domain article available from my own website.

You might ask, why can't JSTOR just make this stuff available for free? After all, JSTOR says its mission is "supporting scholarly work and access to knowledge around the world."

Why indeed, especially considering I CAN GET THE ENTIRE 475-PAGE JOURNAL VOLUME FOR FREE FROM THE INTERNET ARCHIVE and GOOGLE BOOKS. (That includes not just "Criminal Appeal in England," but also such scintilators as "The Late Lord Davey" by the Right Honourable Lord Macnaghten. All for the low, low price of FREE.)

And it's not just old, public domain articles. Current scholarship is increasingly being offered for free from journals' own websites as soon as it is printed. Not to mention the quickly accreting mass of articles on free-access sites SSRN and the Arxiv.

Maybe JSTOR seemed like a good idea when it was launched 16 years ago. But today, if other organizations are doing for free what JSTOR is charging for, then perhaps JSTOR should be dismantled or substantially reworked. JSTOR in a big enterprise, and I am not familar with all of its parts. It may be that JSTOR provides important services that otherwise wouldn't be available. I don't know. But I do know that, at least with part of its collection, JSTOR is playing rope-a-dope, hoping to shake money out of chumps too unlucky to know they could have gotten the same wares for nothing if they just had clicked elsewhere.

JSTOR should act now to make as much of its database free as it can, including all public domain materials and all copyrighted materials for which the requisite permissions can be obtained. It seems to me that the only reason JSTOR would not do so at this point is because JSTOR has become so entrenched that it's more interested in self-perpetuation than public good. And if that's the case, JSTOR may constitute a continuing menace to the preservation of scholarship and access to it – the very things it was founded to promote.