The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0260 Monday, 5 May 2008
From: Gabriel Egan <
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Date: Saturday, 3 May 2008 12:57:20 +0100
Subject: 19.0254 A Problem of Access
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0254 A Problem of Access
Jack Heller writes:
>Apparently, an individual also cannot
>subscribe to Project Muse. I'd welcome
>some good, immediate suggestions for
>how to resolve this.
And Hardy writes:
>. . . my University has not subscribed to the
>articles, a service that costs $25,000 per year.
The short-term solution is to get someone who has access to fetch the
stuff. (Jack, you are welcome to send me the details in case I already
have these items ;-)
The medium-term solution is to show a senior dean a list of the places
that she likes to think of your institution as being equals and rivals
to, and that have already subscribed to the resource you want. Project
Muse's website gives this information under 'Current Subscribers'.
Explaining that not having Project Muse will make students (especially
graduate and research students) choose the rival institutions can be a
powerfully persuasive move.
The long-term solution is for US institutions to form consortia so that
they present the providers of these digital resources with a larger
unified market and drive the prices down. In the UK the Joint
Information Systems Committee represents all university-level users and
makes remarkable deals on big digital products. The relative
fragmentation of the US education system is a barrier in this regard.
The ideal solution, of course, is Open Acess: nobody should give the
results of their publicly-funded research to an organization, even a
not-for-profit one like Project Muse (via publication in a commercial
journal), that sells it on. This knowledge already belongs to the
citizens who paid for it.
Gabriel Egan
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