This is very good news: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that JSTOR, the database of academic journals, is about to beta-test a system that will allow users to access a limited number of journal articles for free.
It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.
But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.
To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals.
This is an exciting development. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it has always frustrated me that it's comparatively difficult to access peer-reviewed research. I know, it has always been possible to buy reprints of journal articles you want to read ($30 a pop is not an atypical charge), and it has always been possible (for me, an able-bodied resident of a major urban area) to trek physically to the libraries at the state university and do my searching from there, but face it ... with these obstacles, it's always been easier just to do the best one can with Wikipedia.
Besides, at least when I was working on my graduate degree, I found that I generally didn't know if an article was going to be useful until after I'd read it. That makes me rather unwilling to arrange childcare and cross town for a single article, or to pay $30 for the privilege of accessing it.
Make no mistakes, the program described in the Chronicle is severely limited: few people, however self-motivated, will be able to conduct significant independent research at the rate of six articles a month (partly because of that phenomenon I described -- with the exception of seminal "classic" papers or comprehensive literature reviews, it's hard to tell whether an article is useful until after you've read it). But maybe this will be a step forward into a new era that makes independent scholarship more accessible to everyone. As Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic points out,
Why is this important? Well, get a load of this stat. JSTOR told the Chronicle that each and every year, they turn away 150 million attempts to gain access to articles. That's right. 150 million attempts!
The way I see it, that's 150 million chances lost to improve the quality of the Internet. JSTOR, as the keeper of so much great scholarly work, should be one of the Internet's dominant suppliers of facts and serious research. But if something is not publicly available, key gatekeepers like journalists and Wikipedians, move to the best available source, even if they know that there probably is a better source behind JSTOR's paywall.
150 million potential pageviews is a lot of potential transactions, and if awareness grew that you could actually access the content of scholarly journals, it's likely there would be many more. If JSTOR can find a way to monetize these access attempts in a way that delivers decent bang-for-the-buck, a real win-win situation could be created: profit for the journal, which after all has to pay the bills, and a more fluid -- if not entirely "free" -- flow of information.
This would be good for everyone: patients who need to understand the latest research about their own medical diagnoses, activists who want to marshall the best arguments to rally people to their causes, independent scholars who seek to educate themselves, high-school level home-educated students, high school teachers, tech professionals temporarily absent from the workforce who need to stay current in their field -- and nerds like me who just like to go straight to the source and maybe blog about it. It could be good for the journals, too.
Another thought: does your local library offer access to any databases? We don't have that program here, but did in Virginia. The community college library also gave out passwords to various fee-based resources, not JSTOR, but similar. Required some legwork to get into the library to pick up the password page, but you could access them from home.
Posted by: Emily J | 22 January 2012 at 05:03 PM
That's good news indeed. I can't tell you how often I've been frustrated while searching for something only to find it was on JSTOR and unavailable. Imagine how mch they could make if they could implement some kind of micropayment system. At ten cents an article....
Posted by: MelanieB | 22 January 2012 at 05:19 PM