Royal Society frees up journal archive

peter.suber's bookmarks 2017-03-25

Summary:

"The archive [of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society] was digitized in 1999 by JSTOR, the US-based archive for academic journals, for a sum in the ‘high five figures in US dollars’. Royal Society commercial director Stuart Taylor says they have been thinking about making part of the archive free for some time. As digitization of print works gets easier and cheaper, “we do not feel it is justifiable to continue charging for access [to out-of-copyright material]”, Taylor said. The Royal Society’s pay-per-view income for the entire archive (including papers after 1941) amounts to less than 0.5% of their total publishing revenues.

In July, programmer Greg Maxwell uploaded nearly 19,000 articles from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, all of them published before 1923, onto the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay (in stated support for computer coder Aaron Swartz, who is still facing a federal indictment for downloading over 4 million articles from JSTOR). The Royal Society’s release today means that the articles Maxwell uploaded are all now free to view. Maxwell’s action did not affect the Society’s decision, says Taylor...."

Link:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/royal_society_frees_up_journal_1.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.pd oa.journals oa.uk oa.societies oa.digitization oa.jstor oa.guerrilla oa.copyright

Date tagged:

03/25/2017, 11:23

Date published:

03/25/2017, 07:26