Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Free JSTOR

Manan Ahmed points to both Danah Boyd's decision to publish in only Open Access Journals and Harvard's decision to require that all scholars affiliated with it allow free publication of their work. Thus inspired, he has decided to instigate a "Free JSTOR" campaign. Why? As Manan writes:
One of my biggest complaint about our academic world is about the inaccessibility of research to anyone without institutional affiliation or a hefty bank account. The impact of which is that, academic work in the humanities remains largely confined to a handful of readers and commentators.
I couldn't agree more. As a non-affiliated, "independent" historian, I can't access JSTOR from home because I can't justify paying the single-user fee. Of course, I can do so from one of the many libraries around, but having to take a trip to the stacks sort of takes the spontaneity out of history blogging. Being able to access them online for free, or even a minimal charge, would certainly be better!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

well, i.m willing to offer any of Jstor articles to anyone, for free. i definitely would like to share user passwords, but these would not work very long, if server is overaccessed with queries form different IP.s but with same user accounts.
so, feel free to mail me the title of article und (or) the Jstor link at
enoeda_shibaru@yahoo.com
and, as soon as possible, I will send you the required texts.
...also Project Muse and EBSCO databases.

PS. the reason for this is i will not pay around 700/1000 us dollars per month to read the stuff.