JSTOR for Life (or How my Alma Mater can get a yearly donation out of me)

infoneer-pulse:

Yale is the latest of 19 institutions to provide unlimited access to JSTOR to alumni through the archive’s Alumni Access pilot, which it opened with little fanfare in 2009. The pilot grew out of little more than speculation and a sense that offering perpetual access to the popular library resource could be a boon for the colleges’ alumni relations and generate a little extra money for JSTOR. (The initial price is 10 percent more than the institutions’ existing content license.)

Now, with two full years of usage data under their belts, some colleges are finding that even though many alumni no longer have to write scholarly papers after they graduate, some still enjoy being able to read them.

» via Inside Higher Ed

I graduated from WFU in 2004 and every year since I’ve received those glossy packets in the mail imploring me to donate back to the university. But I have not contributed a dime. “What’s the point?” I ask myself. I’ll leave aside the fact that my major’s department head refused to write me a recommendation for graduate school — I went on to enroll in a great program at SOAS — and the university’s career services was a farce — though aren’t they everywhere?

Well, here’s a point: I would gladly contribute a yearly donation to WFU if they signed on to the JSTOR Alumni Access Pilot. JSTOR access is revoked as soon as you leave your learning institution and your student card expires, and there have never been membership options for individuals, although JSTOR’s website says they “expect to move forward with additional access options in the coming months and years”. Basically if you want electronic access to your favorite journals you have to individually subscribe to each one. That’s cost prohibitive for someone like me who is no longer in the academic world but still enjoys reading scholarly works for fun.