[delayed]

this unlocked memories in me that were long forgotten. Ashokan Farewell !!

I didn’t recognize it by name and thought, “I wonder if that’s the theme for pbs the civil war…”, imagine my satisfaction after pulling it up ;)

I started reading the first article in one of those issues only to realize it was just a preview of something very paywalled. Why does Johns Hopkins need money so badly that it has to hold historical knowledge hostage? :(

Perhaps they are trying to raise capital for AI infrastructure. :)

Isn’t john hopkins a university? I feel like holding knowledge hostage is their entire business model.

Pretty funny to see people posting about "holding knowledge hostage" on a thread about a new LLM version from a company which 100% intends to make that its business model.

I'd be ok with a $20 montly sub for access to all the world's academic journals.

So, yet another permanent rent seeking scheme? That's bad enough for Netflix, D+, YouTube Premium, Spotify and god knows what else that bleeds money every month out of you.

But science? That's something that IMHO should be paid for with tax money, so that it is accessible for everyone without consideration of one's ability to have money that can be bled.

The situation we had/have is arguably the result of the 'tax' money system. Governments lavishly funding bloated university administrations that approve equally lavish multi million access deals with a select few publishers for students and staff, while the 'general public' basically had no access at all.

The publishers are the problem. Your solution asks the publisher to extort less money.

Aka not happening.

This is exactly the problem that pay-per-use LLM access is causing. It's gating the people who need the information the most and causing a divide between the "haves" and "have nots" but at a much larger potential for dividing us.

Sure for me, $20/mo is fine, in fact, I work on AI systems, so I can mostly just use my employer's keys for stuff. But what about the rest of the world where $20/mo is a huge amount of money? We are going to burn through the environment and the most disenfranchised amongst us will suffer the most for it.

The journal appears to be published by an office with 7 FTE's which presumably is funded by the money raised by presence of the paywall and sales of their journals and books. Fully-loaded costs for 7 folks is on the order of $750k/year. https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/

Someone has to foot that bill. Open-access publishing implies the authors are paying the cost of publication and its popularity in STEM reflects an availability of money (especially grant funds) to cover those author page charges that is not mirrored in the social sciences and humanities.

Unrelatedly given recent changes in federal funding Johns Hopkins is probably feeling like it could use a little extra cash (losing $800 million in USAID funding, overhead rates potential dropping to existential crisis levels, etc...)

They could pay them from the $13B endowment they have.

Johns Hopkins University has an endowment of $13B, but as I already noted above, this journal has no direct affiliation with Johns Hopkins whatsoever so the size of Johns Hopkins' endowment is completely irrelevant here. They just host a website which allows online reading of academic journals.

This particular journal is published by Kent State University, which has an endowment of less than $200 million.

> Open-access publishing implies the authors are paying the cost of publication and its popularity in STEM reflects an availability of money

No it implied the journal not double-dipping by extorting both the author and the reader, while not actually performing any valuable task whatsoever for that money.

> while not actually performing any valuable task whatsoever for that money.

Like with complaints about landlords not producing any value, I think this is an overstatement? Rather, in both cases, the income they bring in is typically substantially larger than what they contribute, due to economic rent, but they do both typically produce some non-zero value.

Johns Hopkins is not the publisher of this journal and does not hold copyright for this journal. Why are you blaming them?

The website linked above is just a way to read journals online, hosted by Johns Hopkins. As it states, "Most of our users get access to content on Project MUSE through their library or institution. For individuals who are not affiliated with a library or institution, we provide options for you to purchase Project MUSE content and subscriptions for a selection of Project MUSE journals."