JSTOR announces free limited reading access to its journal archive <http://wp.me/p20y83-zK> I am an academic librarian at a small liberal arts college. I am committed, within the confines of a finite library budget, to provide access to the most relevant, highest quality information resources (journals, books, and media) possible for our students and faculty. One important component of this access commitment are the 11 Arts & Sciences collections and 1 Life Science collection (over 1,600 titles) we subscribe to on the JSTOR full text journal archive platform. ...
In a press release dated January 9, 2013, JSTOR announced that following a successful 10-month test, it is now expanding an experiment called Register & Read, which will give anyone who signs up for a JSTOR account free online reading access to up to three articles every two weeks in over 1,200 journals "from nearly 800 scholarly societies, university presses, and academic publishers" in the JSTOR archive. Affiliation with an academic institution is not required. ... I'm sure they ran the numbers after the pilot to arrive at this figure. I'm also sure they engaged in a Herculean effort to get buy-in from all the publishers that agreed to join the program. I don't want to sound ungrateful. It's a start. Maybe it's not the number of articles so much as the access timeframe that feels particularly tight-fisted. Research activity is not evenly spaced in time like this. If I'm doing research or working on a writing project I need access to many sources in relatively short spurts of time. Three articles every two weeks translates into 78 articles a year, 39 articles every 6 months, or 20 (rounding-up from 19.5) articles every quarter. What if JSTOR gave me the option of accessing up to 20 articles every three months to use as I needed? That would have an entirely different feel about it--more generous. It would make the Register & Read service significantly more useful to independent scholars. I don't see Register & Read as a form of open access, though I grant it is a step toward the opening of access. ... Gary F. Daught Omega Alpha | Open Access <http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com> Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology oa.openaccess @ gmail.com | @OAopenaccess _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
