Locked Out « Adventures in (Post) Gradland

“Today a moment that I’ve been dreading finally arrived: I’ve lost all access to my university’s online research databases.  There was no announcement, no warning. I just went to log in and couldn’t. The place where I’ve spent huge volumes of time reading and analyzing hundreds of journal articles is now off limits to me... When you’re affiliated with a university, access to these databases is ‘free’ (your tuition pays for it, and your university pays a lot of money for it). Once you lose your affiliation, though, you lose your access.  For PhDs who’ve just graduated but remain on the job market (and thus temporarily unaffiliated with a university), the loss of that access is more than just an inconvenience. It might mean that you can’t access the articles you need to complete your dissertation, that you can’t keep up with the research you’ll surely be asked about in a job talk. It means you’re cut off, in more ways than one.  People have various ways of getting around this problem. The most obvious one is just to borrow someone else’s login ID, which is very common, even though universities can get in a lot of trouble for it. The other is to ask someone with a login ID to access certain materials for you. Neither of these options are really long-term solutions.  The question of why individual subscriptions aren’t even available to online databases like JSTOR isn’t easy to answer...  1. Authors who publish in journals affiliated with JSTOR do not get paid...  2. My own university paid upwards of $2 million annually for subscriptions that included JSTOR, Project Muse, ProQuest, and several dozen other online databases.  3. You can pay for individual articles on JSTOR (some, not all), but the cost can be prohibitively expensive–sometimes as much as $30 per article...  4. At present, JSTOR does not offer individual subscriptions to anyone. As in, even if you could afford the hefty fees (apparently around $50,000 a year)... 5. JSTOR describes itself as not-for-profit, which really makes me wonder where all that money is going. Yes, I realize that those articles don’t scan and upload themselves, but still, when you add up what JSTOR is being paid by thousands of institutions around the world, that’s a lot of money for a not-for-profit.  Let me be clear here: I am not making an argument that access to JSTOR and other online research databases should be free. I understand that there is human work involved in uploading and cataloging tens of thousands of articles. I would happily pay as much as $500 a year for access to JSTOR alone ... Given that the number of non-affiliated academics is growing, why does access to the scholarship that we need to do our research remain locked behind institutional walls?  I think part of the answer is the power that major journal publishers wield, and the knowledge that they can make a lot more money by limiting access to institutions. Academics are prisoners of prestige ... and thus they’ll look the other way when those journals and their online providers engage in decidedly shady behavior. Institutional libraries that try to negotiate with mega-publishers like Elsevier can have all their journal access cut off... One respected Cambridge mathematician recently launched a boycott of Elsevier , which publishes more than 2600 journals. To date, more than 12,000 people who were clearly fed up with the academic publishing status quo have signed the boycott list... Check out On The Media’s February 2012 story of the Elsevier boycott and Tim Gowers’ original blog post. You can add your name to the Elsevier boycott list here...”