{"id":908,"date":"2011-09-08T11:41:25","date_gmt":"2011-09-08T15:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=908"},"modified":"2013-03-17T19:49:42","modified_gmt":"2013-03-17T23:49:42","slug":"jstor-opens-access-to-out-of-copyright-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2011\/09\/08\/jstor-opens-access-to-out-of-copyright-articles\/","title":{"rendered":"JSTOR opens access to out-of-copyright articles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
\"Cover<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cover of the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society<\/a>, dated March 6, 1665. Available<\/a> from JSTOR’s Early Journal Content collection.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

JSTOR<\/a>, the non-profit online journal distributor, announced yesterday<\/a> that they would be making pre-1923 US articles and pre-1870 non-US articles available for free in a program they call “Early Journal Content”. The chosen dates are not random of course; they guarantee that the articles have fallen out of copyright, so such distribution does not run into rights issues. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that JSTOR could take this action unilaterally. JSTOR is further bound by agreements with the publishers who provided the journals for scanning, which may have precluded them contractually from distributing even public domain materials that were derived from the provided originals. Thus such a program presumably requires cooperation of the journal publishers. In addition, JSTOR requires goodwill from publishers for all of its activities, so unilateral action could have been problematic for its long-run viability. (Such considerations may even in part underly JSTOR’s not including all public domain material<\/a> in the opened collection.)<\/p>\n

Arranging for the necessary permissions \u2014 whether legal or pro forma \u2014 takes time, and JSTOR claims<\/a> that work towards the opening of these materials started “about a year ago”, that is, prior to the recent notorious illicit download program that I have posted about previously<\/a>.\u00a0Predictably, the Twittersphere is full of speculation about whether the actions by Aaron Swartz affected the Early Journal Content program:<\/p>\n

@grimmelm: JSTOR makes pre-1923 journals freely available\u00a0http:\/\/about.jstor.org\/participate-jstor\/individuals\/early-journal-content<\/a>\u00a0Would this have happened earlier or later w\/o @aaronsw?<\/p>\n

@mecredis: JSTOR makes all their public domain content available for free: http:\/\/about.jstor.org\/news-events\/news\/jstor%E2%80%93free-access-early-journal-content<\/a> I think this means @aaronsw wins.<\/p>\n

@maxkaiser: Breaking: @JSTOR to provide free #openaccess to pre-1923 content in US & pre-1870 elsewhere – @aaronsw case had impact: http:\/\/about.jstor.org\/news-events\/news\/jstor%E2%80%93free-access-early-journal-content<\/a><\/p>\n

@JoshRosenau: JSTOR “working on releasing pre-1923 content before [@aaronsw released lotsa their PDFs], inaccurate to say these events had no impact.”<\/p>\n

@mariabustillos: Stuff that in yr. pipe and smoke it, JSTOR haters!! http:\/\/bit.ly\/qtrxdV<\/a> Also: how now, @aaronsw?<\/p>\n

So, did Aaron Swartz’s efforts affect the existence of JSTOR’s new program or its timing?\u00a0As to the former, it seems clear that with or without his actions, JSTOR was already on track to provide open access to out-of-copyright materials. As to the latter, JSTOR says<\/a> that<\/p>\n

[I]t would be inaccurate to say that these events have had no impact on our planning. We considered whether to delay or accelerate this action, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations. In the end, we decided to press ahead with our plans to make the Early Journal Content available, which we believe is in the best interest of our library and publisher partners, and students, scholars, and researchers everywhere.<\/p>\n

On its face, the statement implies that JSTOR acted essentially without change, but\u00a0we’ll never know if Swartz’s efforts sped up or slowed down the release.<\/p>\n

What the Early Journal Content program does show is JSTOR’s interest in providing broader access to the scholarly literature, a goal they share with open-access advocates, and even with Aaron Swartz. I hope and expect that JSTOR will continue to push, and even more aggressively, towards broader access to its collection. The scholarly community will be watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cover of the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dated March 6, 1665. Available from JSTOR’s Early Journal Content collection. JSTOR, the non-profit online journal distributor, announced yesterday that they would be making pre-1923 US articles and pre-1870 non-US articles available for free in a program they call “Early Journal Content”. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[618,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-access","category-scholarly-communication"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5pLfN-eE","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":896,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2011\/07\/28\/on-guerrilla-open-access\/","url_meta":{"origin":908,"position":0},"title":"On guerrilla open access","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Thursday, July 28, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"William G. Bowen, founder of JSTOR [Update January 13, 2013: See my post following Aaron Swartz's tragic suicide.] Aaron Swartz has been indicted for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. The alleged activities that led to this indictment were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1610,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2013\/01\/13\/aaron-swartzs-legacy\/","url_meta":{"origin":908,"position":1},"title":"Aaron Swartz’s legacy","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Sunday, January 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Government zealotry in prosecuting brilliant people is a repeating theme. It gave rise to one of the great intellectual tragedies of the 20th century, the death of Alan Turing after his appalling treatment by the British government. Sadly, we have just been presented with another case. Aaron Swartz committed suicide\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Alan Turing"","block_context":{"text":"Alan Turing","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/computer-science\/alan-turing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":271,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2009\/08\/05\/new-paper-on-oa-in-plos-biology\/","url_meta":{"origin":908,"position":2},"title":"New paper on OA in PLoS Biology","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Wednesday, August 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"My paper on the \"open-access compact\" is now available from PLoS Biology and at my web site. An excerpt: Scholars write articles to be read\u2014the more access to their articles the better\u2014so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1284,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/03\/30\/statement-before-the-house-science-committee\/","url_meta":{"origin":908,"position":3},"title":"Statement before the House Science Committee","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Friday, March 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cMajesty of Law\u201d Statue in front of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., photo by flickr user NCinDC, used by permission (CC-by-nd) Here is my written testimony filed in association with my appearance yesterday at the\u00a0hearing on \"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests\" before\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1789,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2013\/07\/10\/ecumenical-open-access-and-the-finch-report-principles\/","url_meta":{"origin":908,"position":4},"title":"Ecumenical open access and the Finch Report principles","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Wednesday, July 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"...myopic... \"myopic\" image by flickr user haglundc used by permission. I was invited by the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences to write a piece on last year's report \"Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications\" by the\u00a0Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1647,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2013\/01\/29\/why-open-access-is-better-for-scholarly-societies\/","url_meta":{"origin":908,"position":5},"title":"Why open access is better for scholarly societies","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Tuesday, January 29, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"[This is a heavily edited transcript of a talk that I gave on January 3, 2013, at a panel on open access at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA, the main scholarly society for linguistics, and publisher of the journal Language), co-sponsored by the Modern\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=908"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":930,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions\/930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}