Early journals from JSTOR and others

"Earlier this month, JSTOR announced that it would provide free open access to their earliest scholarly journal content, published before 1923. All of this material should be old enough to be in the public domain. (Or at least it is in the US. Since copyrights can last longer elsewhere, JSTOR is only showing pre-1870 volumes openly outside the US.) I was very pleased to hear they would be opening up this content; it’s something I’d asked them to consider ever since they ended a small trial of open, public domain volumes in their early years....Comparing the sites that provide this content is enlightening. In general, the JSTOR copies are better presented, with article-level tables of contents, cross-volume searching, article downloads, and consistently high scan quality. But the copies at other sites are generally usable as well, and sometimes include interesting non-editorial material, such as advertisements, that might not be present in JSTOR’s archive. By opening up access to its early content now, though, JSTOR will remain the preferred access point to this early content for most researchers — and that, hopefully, will help attract and sustain paid support for the larger body of scholarly content that JSTOR provides and preserves for its subscribers....Currently JSTOR has no plans to open up access to post-1922 journal volumes. But many of those volumes have been digitized, and are in Google’s or Hathi Trust’s collections; or they could be digitized by contributors to the Internet Archive or similar text archives. If someone does want to open up these volumes, they should re-check their copyright status. In particular, I have not yet checked the copyright status of individual articles in these journals, which can in theory be renewed separately. In practice, I’ve found this rarely done for scholarly articles, but not completely unknown. It might be feasible for me to do a “first article renewal” inventory for journals, like I’ve done for first issue renewal, which could speed up clearances...."