I’ve been yammering online about the distinctions between different entities in the landscape of digital publishing and access, especially for digital scholarship on text. So I’ve collected everything I’ve learned over the last 10 years into one, handy-to-use, chart on a 10-year-old meme. The big points here are:
HathiTrust and JSTOR are not for-profit cartels, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen faculty and other researchers attack them for not being open enough when they’re just following laws, especially around nonsense justifications for keeping scholarly work out of the public domain, that faculty continually reinforce (through paranoia about, say, disembargoing a dissertation or publishing in an open-access journal that lacks prestige or, God forbid, a journal that skips the tree-killing stage entirely).