How much does Wikipedia charge me to make a copy of an article? What is Wikipedia's annual burn rate?
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Wikipedia scans and digitizes old paper articles?
In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming.
Personally, I'd be fine handing over all journal publishing responsibilities to Google. The one great thing that Google has going for it is that many many many of the engineers there came from academia and understand the value of open access to information. I don't care if they run ads while they do so. It would be orders of magnitude better than the status quo.
I fail to understand how a for-profit corporation that sells your privacy to the $500 billion advertising/media/branding industry is a better steward of this information than a not for profit organization that simply charges a fee for their services.
No, let's not do this. We don't need the scientific literature fucked as badly as Google fucked the USENET archives.
Enlighten me. I'm curious.
Google made a complete hash out of the Usenet archives that they bought from DejaNews; you could literally issue the same search month after month and watch yourself getting progressively fewer and fewer results.
I'm pretty sure Google imposes the same limitations JSTOR does for public domain stuff. Google and JSTOR are both the status quo for digital copies of public domain stuff.
Sir, I've worked on/off with Project Gutenberg for over 12 years (since I was 18). I've mailed thousands of CDs/DVDs full of PG's library to people in thirdwave world countries, and I've also reviewed hundreds of books, on my own time and for no compensation, for their Distributed Proofreaders project (http://www.pgdp.net/c/).
No, I have not tried to digitize old journals. But I HAVE helped contribute to the digitization and distribution of public domain works. I'm aware of the time and financial resource commitments involved.
In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming.
Writing an encyclopedia is time consuming, but we did that.
Walking & driving all over the world is time consuming, but the OpenStreetMap community has done that.
Scanning & digitizing old public domain books is time consuming, but the Project Gutenberg project has done that.
What's next?
Additionally I am pretty sure Wikipedia's annual burn rate is pretty high... Hence the donation request every year and all..
My argument is that Wikipedia has more transparency and a lower burn rate than JSTOR. Also, I would accept the Internet Archive as a feasible repository for the data in question vs JSTOR.
There's a difference between volunteer-written Wikipedia articles and JSTOR documents curated by professional scholars; e.g., the latter are acceptable for citations.