Academic publishing is *weird*, and a lot of the standard assumptions about how writing works (or should work) do not necessarily apply.
(or at least, they have not historically.)
What JSTOR does is absolutely standard practice in academic journals. (and actually, most of the journals collected in JSTOR are a lot better than some, where you not only have to pay for public access to your article, but you have to pay - substantial amounts of money, usually - to get the thing published in the first place: the examples I've heard are especially true in science journals, which is not my field of expertise.)
It's also worth noting that JSTOR is not a journal in and of itself: it is an aggregator of many journals, with issues going way back in some cases (i.e. well out of copyright) as well as new and constantly updated material. Indexing and making those materials available does also have costs associated with it, and they do a lot of standardisation work, some of which can take substantial human-hours to deal with. (Which is to say: I am not convinced that the *amount* of their fees is where it should be, but the fact there are fees in the first place, well, maybe. Since they serve scans of the journal text, the bandwidth is noticeably higher than, say, plain HTML would be.)
Academic authors are generally aware of it (or rather, it takes a complete studied avoidance of the topic *not* to be aware of it). And no one's really happy with it.
It's also complicated to say that academic authors do it for peer recognition. Which is to say, they do, but the actual *benefits* to writing an academic article (as opposed to other forms of communication, like, say, blogging for a more general audience, which a number of academics also do as well) are all tied up with publishing requirements in their field and institution, and they're writing for a very small audience of peers in their academic fields who have the ability to make decisions about their professional careers.
Making the work more generally available is cool - and one should argue, the point of scholarship - but a) many articles aren't written with a general audience in mind and may not be much direct use to people who are not widely read in that specific subfield and b) it's much more a side benefit than the primary purpose. Some academics care about making the original article available. Others may do something like recraft their information for a general audience via a blog, public presentations, or other materials. (And some publish because they have to for tenure or promotion, but don't really want to expand on a given article beyond that.)
There is a growing movement for open access journals and materials: it's playing out in lots of complicated ways in the library discussions I read, and I suspect it's going to be another 5-10 years before there's really lasting substantial movement on it. Academia moves very slowly on some things, and in this case, I think it's going to take a bunch of people getting tenure *partly* based on open-access journals, having the open access model prove reliable and stable, and then being in positions to push their institutions toward more of that in ways that non-tenured faculty can't easily risk (especially in the current economic climate.) Which all takes a while.
(Right now, we are mostly in the "wrangle a lot over whether open access actually improves the scholarly process" (you'd think it would, *but* there are a bunch of questions about how you tell, and what it means for both non-tenured and tenured academics. I know a number of people in tenure-track positions who are doing things like committing to do their best to get one article in a (reputable) open access journal in their field, but recognising that the others need to be in longstanding primary journals in the field, most of which are not yet open access. Over time, that will give data on a bunch of things.)
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-13 07:32 pm (UTC)(or at least, they have not historically.)
What JSTOR does is absolutely standard practice in academic journals. (and actually, most of the journals collected in JSTOR are a lot better than some, where you not only have to pay for public access to your article, but you have to pay - substantial amounts of money, usually - to get the thing published in the first place: the examples I've heard are especially true in science journals, which is not my field of expertise.)
It's also worth noting that JSTOR is not a journal in and of itself: it is an aggregator of many journals, with issues going way back in some cases (i.e. well out of copyright) as well as new and constantly updated material. Indexing and making those materials available does also have costs associated with it, and they do a lot of standardisation work, some of which can take substantial human-hours to deal with. (Which is to say: I am not convinced that the *amount* of their fees is where it should be, but the fact there are fees in the first place, well, maybe. Since they serve scans of the journal text, the bandwidth is noticeably higher than, say, plain HTML would be.)
Academic authors are generally aware of it (or rather, it takes a complete studied avoidance of the topic *not* to be aware of it). And no one's really happy with it.
It's also complicated to say that academic authors do it for peer recognition. Which is to say, they do, but the actual *benefits* to writing an academic article (as opposed to other forms of communication, like, say, blogging for a more general audience, which a number of academics also do as well) are all tied up with publishing requirements in their field and institution, and they're writing for a very small audience of peers in their academic fields who have the ability to make decisions about their professional careers.
Making the work more generally available is cool - and one should argue, the point of scholarship - but a) many articles aren't written with a general audience in mind and may not be much direct use to people who are not widely read in that specific subfield and b) it's much more a side benefit than the primary purpose. Some academics care about making the original article available. Others may do something like recraft their information for a general audience via a blog, public presentations, or other materials. (And some publish because they have to for tenure or promotion, but don't really want to expand on a given article beyond that.)
There is a growing movement for open access journals and materials: it's playing out in lots of complicated ways in the library discussions I read, and I suspect it's going to be another 5-10 years before there's really lasting substantial movement on it. Academia moves very slowly on some things, and in this case, I think it's going to take a bunch of people getting tenure *partly* based on open-access journals, having the open access model prove reliable and stable, and then being in positions to push their institutions toward more of that in ways that non-tenured faculty can't easily risk (especially in the current economic climate.) Which all takes a while.
(Right now, we are mostly in the "wrangle a lot over whether open access actually improves the scholarly process" (you'd think it would, *but* there are a bunch of questions about how you tell, and what it means for both non-tenured and tenured academics. I know a number of people in tenure-track positions who are doing things like committing to do their best to get one article in a (reputable) open access journal in their field, but recognising that the others need to be in longstanding primary journals in the field, most of which are not yet open access. Over time, that will give data on a bunch of things.)