Intellectual Property

The recent articles I posted are only available to blog readers who are belonging to ip numbers within an institution subscribing to the databases. I have been trying to find "free" peer-reviewed journal articles, but have not had much success finding them. There are creative commons texts and books about this issues. Peer reviewed journals have too much monetary resources at stake to allow for free access to their content. Florida State University spend thousands of dollars every year to provide us access to these databases. For example, JSTOR charges large universities like FSU between $20,000 and $45,000 to access new databases. In addition about $8,000 is charged each year for access. It appears that these fees are cumulative, which means that FSU would have to pay several hundred thousand dollars to provide these services. These service are cheaper than storing hundreds of journals in Strozier or Dirac. However, from a social justice standpoint there is a problem with this scenario. How will people be able to access scholarly information from the community. Most public libraries do not subscribe to large numbers of databases due to the high costs involved. Even universities do not subscribe to every possible database. These databases are not being priced by the cost running the web servers and paying the employees for scanning content. Instead these databases are raking in tremendous sums of money from universities that are in no financial position to spend large amounts of money. Thus, there is prioritization of subscriptions.