[hugbox]

JSTOR may be a non-profit, but they earn a lot of money and they're not shy about spending it.

http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...

Of course earning money by itself isn't an evil thing. The bigger problem is that JSTOR is part of a system which many people have come to feel is unjust-- a system whereby the public finances research which is then put behind paywalls.

It isn't just wild-eyed hackers who feel this way. Even Donalth Knuth has commented about how little value the academic journals really provide, and how much they charge.

It is the public who pays for this system. We pay because our taxes and tuition money subsidize the research that we're not allowed to see. The government should require publicly funded research to be made available on a site like arxiv.org. It is those guys who are really in favor of open access, not JSTOR. Throwing us a bone-- some 80-year old manuscripts which are in the public domain anyway-- shouldn't obscure that.

[jrogers65]

There are some newer journals which have open access as a central tenet such as PLOS. It's a non-profit and could always use more donations:

http://www.plos.org/

http://www.plos.org/support-us/individual-membership/#make-a...

[rprasad]

The government generally does require that publicly funded research be made publicly available without cost. However, that same statute grants agencies the right to have such research withheld from public distribution for various reasons (though "national security" is the most popular).