The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that coordinates and manages the global, crowdsourced, most popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, as well as related projects, on Monday announced it had reached a deal with paid online academic journal archive JSTOR (short for “Journal Storage”) to allow a select group of top Wikipedia editors access to the complete JSTOR collection for a year, in order to improve accuracy and reliability of Wikipedia articles. The program is just a pilot for now, but Wikipedia said it could be expanded if it goes well.
The move marks JSTOR’s– known by users as a locked box of academic articles — continued march toward more of an open access model. JSTOR in September 2011 announced it was making 500,000 public domain articles free to access online, about six percent of its total archives. That change came after programmer and online activist Aaron Swartz (and co-founder of Reddit and the RSS specification) allegedly stole and posted online 33 gigabytes of JSTOR files, for which he was charged with data theft.
