the pinakes

There was a recent piece posted by the Atlantic about the cost cycle and paywall of academic articles. It’s a big issue and access to scholarly journals is a topic that merits real discussion and hopefully change. However, the article itself was so poorly researched and inaccurate it does a disservice to the conversation.

The article supposes that the villain is JSTOR. It’s not.

The author of the Atlantic piece is bemoaning his inability to access the latest research in autism and blames JSTOR, even though the vast majority of JSTOR content (aside from their small and new “Current Scholarship” program) is 3 years old or older. JSTOR is designed to be the alternative to print journal storage for back issues; if you’re looking for current articles and the latest research, JSTOR is not where you should go. JSTOR is a not-for-profit that has done tremendous work digitizing and saving thousands of historic scholarly journals, dating back over a century of content, that libraries are throwing away. They are providing access to a treasure trove of valuable content that libraries cannot afford to maintain or store.

Actual current research is packaged and sold by for-profit companies like Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis — if you have a problem with the model for academic publishing, those are the publishers you should take it up with.

Because of that poorly written article, I’m seeing “fuck JSTOR” going around on Tumblr as if JSTOR has anything to do with the problem. And therefore the internet is pissing me off.