is this database my friend?
JSTOR, open access, and the commodification of knowledge
A few months ago, Twitter user @lilcutieorange posted a tweet directed at the academic database JSTOR, which read: “I'm soooooooooo drunk @JSTOR Jstorrrrrrrr.” While this tweet received around 11,000 likes, JSTOR’s reply of “Please stay hydrated!” received more than 100,000. Two weeks later, @lilcutieorange shared a photo of several items of JSTOR-branded merchandise that they had received as recognition of their virality; the spread included a baseball cap, a tote bag, and multiple stickers. True to form, JSTOR took the opportunity to respond with one last quip, quote-tweeting the post with the message: “Thank YOU Tallulah! Don't forget to pack a water bottle in that tote 😌.”
Founded in 1994 by a former president of Princeton University and boasting more than 12 million items in its collections, JSTOR is among the best-known digital repositories of scholarly books, journals, and papers. It is, arguably, also the most beloved. Take a brief scroll through its official Twitter account, and you might think for a moment that you’re looking at the feed of a social media-savvy snack company or a trendy new tech startup rather than a two-decade-old academic database. Scattered alongside links to blog posts and podcast episodes highlighting JSTOR’s collections and mission are tongue-in-cheek GIFs, invocations of Gen-Z slang, and quippy one-word replies—all the hallmarks of a clout-hungry Brand desperately clawing around for some shred of viral relatability.
The aforementioned exchange between JSTOR and @lilcutieorange is emblematic of the way that many Twitter users relate to the academic database, whose acronymic name has—at least among 20-somethings who like to think of themselves as ‘intellectuals’ and ‘cultural critics’ (I know, I know; the call is coming from inside the house)—practically become a synonym for knowledge itself. Among this crowd, the name ‘JSTOR’ is uttered with the same reverence that people use to talk about beloved celebrities; expressions along the lines of “don’t even think about asking me out unless you can give me your JSTOR login” are commonplace.
The celebrification of JSTOR is due in no small part to the fact that unlike countless other repositories of academic knowledge, JSTOR is relatively unique in the extent of its efforts to make itself accessible to members of the general public. In 2011, for example, JSTOR announced that it would be making some 500,000 public-domain journal articles—around 6 percent of JSTOR’s total collections at the time—freely available to all users. A few months later, in March 2012, JSTOR launched an experimental “Register and Read” program, allowing unaffiliated researchers to access up to three articles every two weeks. JSTOR expanded this program at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so that a personal account now allows a user to access up to 100 articles per month free of charge (with the caveat that “according to publisher policies, not all articles are included in the free online reading program”).
On its face, there is nothing particularly objectionable about any of this. In a world where scholarly knowledge (much of which is funded by taxpayers in the first place) is increasingly locked away behind exorbitant paywalls, any effort—no matter how piecemeal—to make this knowledge more accessible to the general public is, unequivocally, a good thing. At the end of the day, however, JSTOR is as much a gatekeeper of knowledge as the for-profit academic publishing conglomerates whose books and journals comprise its catalog. There is something thoroughly insidious about an institution whose operational model is predicated upon the withholding of knowledge being not only praised for the most minimal gestures in the direction of public access, but actively elevated to near-celebrity status simply because of a few clever tweets and well-designed merch items. The whole thing calls to mind an evergreen tweet, now sadly deleted, posted in 2015 by Twitter user @negaversace:
Nearly a decade later, we’re still asking ourselves the same questions about brands—from the budget airlines we fly to the apps we use to teach ourselves new languages—who spend millions of dollars on digital marketing strategies designed to build parasocial relationships with their social media followers. JSTOR, it would seem, is no exception. If the discursive black hole that is Twitter is to be believed, this database is, in fact, our friend—or at the very least, it desperately wants us to believe that it is.
On January 6th, 2011, campus police officers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology arrested 24-year-old Aaron Swartz near Harvard University’s campus in Cambridge, MA. Swartz, a rising star in the tech world who had already made a name for himself as a cofounder of Reddit and an outspoken activist for public information access and progressive political issues, was indicted on a number of federal and state criminal charges including breaking and entering, wire fraud, and computer fraud. Altogether, the potential penalties for these charges added up to decades in prison and $1 million in fines.
According to the accusations leveled against him, Swartz, who had full JSTOR acces through a research fellowship at Harvard, had set up a hidden laptop in an unlocked closet on MIT’s campus, which he had programmed to mass-download academic articles from JSTOR with the intention of illegally uploading them to public file-sharing networks. (Notably, he never actually distributed any of the downloaded material.) Federal prosecutors, led by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, pursued Swartz’s case with a zeal that shocked many, treating Swartz as an ordinary thief—despite the fact that his ‘crime’ was, for all intents and purposes, victimless. In a press release issued after Swartz’s indictment was unsealed, Ortiz declared that “stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar.” On January 11th, 2013—just over two years after his arrest, and a month before his case was set to go to trial, Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment from an apparent suicide.
After Swartz’s death, a petition demanding Ortiz’s removal from office received more than 52,000 signatures, and critics such as former White House counsel John Dean described the 13-count case against Swartz as an example of “overzealous overcharging” by “heartless bastards…[and] authoritarian personalities who get their jollies from shamelessly beating up on unfortunate people.” Harvey Silverglate, a prominent civil liberties attorney and the cofounder of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the tech publication CNET that “[Swartz] was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious -- politically-ambitious -- U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights.”
As news of his death spread, Swartz was quickly embraced as a martyr by advocates for digital liberties and open access to information. Online vigilante groups like Anonymous responded to Swartz’s death with a series of high-profile hacks, including a hack which redirected the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s website to a page displaying the statement: “Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice.” Swartz’s death also prompted tributes from figures such as World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote on Twitter: “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”
In July 2008, when he was just twenty-one years old, Swartz published the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, which begins with a searing indictment of the current system of paywalls and gatekeepers that keeps access to knowledge restricted to a select few:
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
In the manifesto, Swartz writes that people such as students and librarians, whose institutional affiliations grant them access to information that is otherwise locked away from the general public, have the “privilege” of “[feeding] at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out.” Anyone in this position, according to Swartz, has a responsibility to do whatever they can to share this knowledge—“trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends”—regardless of what the law has to say about it. “Sharing,” Swartz writes, “isn’t immoral—it’s a moral imperative.”
The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto is just one part of the longer history of the open access movement. Calls for open access, defined by UNESCO as “free access to information and unrestricted use of electronic resources,” began in the 1990s with the rise of online publishing and the launch of digital repositories such as arXiv, to which researchers were encouraged to upload their articles prior to publication in scientific journals. In 2001, more than 34,000 researchers from around the world signed an open letter calling for the “establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of [scientific] research…in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form,” and pledging not to publish in journals that did not adhere to open-access standards.
That December, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation convened a conference in Budapest, out of which came the Budapest Open Access Initiative. In a statement published in February 2002, the Initiative declared that the “old tradition” of scholarly research and the “new technology” of the Internet “have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good”—“the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.” In order to realize this dream, the Initiative called for a two-pronged approach to open access—first, scholars should practice “self-archiving” by “[depositing] their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives;” and second, scholars should commit to publishing in and supporting open-access journals which “will not charge subscription or access fees” and “will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish.”
In the two decades since the Initiative’s launch, the open access movement has gained considerable steam. Many top research institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, and the University of California system, have adopted open access mandates that require affiliated scholars to make their research openly available, and in August of 2022, the White House announced a new open access mandate policy for all research conducted with funding from the federal government. According to the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, the share of all research articles published under ‘gold’ open access—the highest mainstream standard of open access, in which the final published version of an article is made permanently and freely available online—increased from 9 percent to 35 percent between 2012 and 2022. Open access, it would seem, is the publishing model of the future.
The movement for open access was born out of the noblest of intentions—a sincerely-held and thoroughly justified belief on the part of thousands of researchers that the public has a fundamental right to access the knowledge that has been produced for its benefit. In practice, however, open access has a number of problems that belie these lofty principles. In a 2023 article in the journal Social Science and Medicine, researchers John Frank, Rosemary Foster, and Claudia Pagliari observe that the embrace of open-access publishing has done little to disrupt the oligopoly of major academic publishers such as Taylor & Francis and Reed Elsevier, which continue to control a staggering share of the market and whose profit margins are close to 40 percent. In their analysis, Frank et al. note as well that researchers who want to publish in open access journals are often expected to pay exorbitant ‘article processing charges’ (APCs)—a practice which disproportionately affects researchers, including early-career scholars and those who are affiliated with poorer institutions (particularly in the Global South), who lack the institutional support and funding to cover these fees. The authors write:
Profiteering by the major publishing houses, inequitable institutional incentives that leave large categories of researchers excluded, and fake or predatory journals driven only by a profit motive, have combined to disrupt the democratic and egalitarian goals of the [Open Access] movement’s founders and supporters.
At the heart of the problem lies the fact that even though open access is often framed as a project which has the potential to radically transform contemporary knowledge production, it nevertheless works within and remains constrained by the logic of a capitalist system where everything—including (and perhaps especially) knowledge—is a commodity to be bought, sold, and profited from. The mainstream push for open access, which relies upon voluntary adoption and the invisible hand of the market to drive a shift in the way research is published, only serves to reinforce, rather than challenge, this underlying capitalist logic. As scientific historian Michael Hagner argues in a 2018 essay for the Swiss Medical Weekly:
As a business model of academic capitalism, [Open Access] is already a reality; as a programme for bringing together the human race in intellectual dialogue and a common quest for knowledge, it remains a utopia.
With its excoriation of avaricious publishing conglomerates and the politicians they keep in their pockets, Aaron Swartz’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto pushes back against this logic. At its core, the Manifesto is a call for mass civil disobedience in the name of liberating knowledge production and distribution from the iniquities of capitalism. “There is no justice,” according to Swartz,
in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
11 years after Aaron Swartz’s death, his legacy lives on in the form of a guerrilla open access movement which has managed to achieve several times over what Swartz set out to do when he first hooked up that laptop in a dusty MIT storage closet. The shadow library Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Kazakhstani programmer Anna Elbakyan, maintains a publicly available database of over 88.3 million items, mostly academic journal articles—according to a 2018 study, some 85 percent of all paywalled scholarly papers are available on the site. Its adoption has been widespread—the Sci-Hub website saw more than 500,000 daily visitors as of 2019, and more than half of all academics report having used it and other similar websites to bypass paywalls.
It goes without saying that the core ethos of a project like Sci-Hub, which hosts books and journal articles for public access without regard to copyright, is not, strictly speaking, legal. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that such projects have consistently been the target of concerted efforts to shut them down since their inception. Sci-Hub and its counterparts in the world of shadow libraries, including Z-Library and Library Genesis, have repeatedly been sued by academic publishers and ordered to cease operations for copyright infringement. Time and time again, users of these sites have attempted to access them, only to be met with an endless loading screen or an alarming notice that “this domain has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
And yet, like a game of piratical Whac-A-Mole, they keep popping back up. If the movement for guerrilla open access has proven anything over the last several years, it’s that killing it is no easy feat. Less than two weeks after U.S. authorities seized more than 240 Z-Library domains, an anonymous team of internet archivists launched Anna’s Archive—a search engine and digital library that not only restores access to Z-Library’s catalogue, but aggregates it with several other shadow libraries, including Sci-Hub. The result is what we might call a ‘superlibrary,’ with two stated goals: 1) “backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity,” and 2) “making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.” This is a lofty pursuit—and, if you ask me, a noble one, regardless of what the gatekeepers of knowledge have to say about it.
The fight for free and open access to human knowledge—not the defanged, piecemeal version that the mainstream open access movement has created, but a radical reordering of the way that information is produced, stored, and shared—is about more than just being able to access a journal article without having to pay for it. It’s about resisting the nefarious encroachment of capitalist logics onto projects of knowledge production and dissemination whose purpose, in a just world, would be about bettering society rather than maximizing profit. The visible signs of this encroachment can be observed in virtually every facet of modern intellectual life, from the gutting of the ‘unprofitable’ humanities to the corporatization of the academic job market to the elevation of pseudo-intellectual charlatans to expert status in popular discourse.
The sealing away of public knowledge behind paywalls and login credentials, accessible only to those fortunate enough to have been welcomed into the ivory tower, is part and parcel of this trend. And no matter how hard institutions like JSTOR try to cultivate parasocial online relationships with their users through relatable tweets and eye-catching merch packages, they will never be able to offer us meaningful a way out of it. If we want to tear down the paywalls, resist the commodification of learning, and lay claim to the knowledge that is rightfully ours, we’ll simply have to take it for ourselves.
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:
I think it's interesting to consider how digital these open access projects are. It reminds me of how Facebook, particularly, used to give out digital devices to poor people in brown countries, except the devices could only access Facebook approved domains. There is this sense that just being able to access the internet allows knowledge to flow, but there are also restrictions in who has computers and phones, who has unlimited mobile data and who doesn't, and of course literacy, and free time Just handing someone a piece of the internet is not liberatory unless there places within it where knowledge is free to access.
What JSTOR gains from being relatable on Twitter is the same as what it gains from having a (limited) open access platform- the illusion of free knowledge without all the chains being loosed. Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin's work laying out how this applies to ebooks and DRM in Chokepoint Capitalism is super pertinent by the way!