Give the world back its giants, JSTOR

If you've ever done remotely serious research on the Web, you'll have encountered JSTOR. As it describes itself, "JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible".

It's not there to be an up-to-the-minute news service. Rather, it concentrates on assembling the corpus of work which reflects the academic state of the art in as many fields as possible. If you want the latest, then subscribe to the journals themselves. JSTOR is between one and five years behind the times, which is just fine. Academic research relies much more heavily on information that's stood the test of time – and in identifying that which hasn't -- than on riding the breaking wave of new ideas.

It is that sense of context which is most missing in today's journalism. I can only properly talk about the journalism I do, which is currently very different to academic research: finding out the very latest events in technology, working out which ones matter to readers, and passing them on.

What's missing, so often, is why. they matter and how they relate to what's happened before. "This new memory technology means that in three years' time, we could all have the equivalent of five hundred iPods embedded in our ears" is as far as it normally goes. The facts that 'this new memory technology' is one of about three hundred such, and that in the past there have been ten good reasons why things like it never escaped from the laboratory for every one reason why this one would, are rarely mentioned. But without this, the job's half done. Bad ideas prosper: good ideas get lost in the noise.

So, when I'm researching a claim from BigChipCo that something marvellous is happening, I want to know the history of the ideas behind it. That means, of course, online searching: that means, invariably, that I find exactly what I want in JSTOR.

Find it, yes. It's crawled by Google. Access it, no. JSTOR is accessible only to member institutions – universities and big libraries – and then only if you have direct access to their networks, either on campus or virtually via remote access that places you on those networks.

It is closed, absolutely, to individuals. There is no option. You can't even buy a subscription or pay JSTOR for articles on a case by case basis.

The only sop thrown to non-members is a page that advises you to directly contact institutions and companies contributing material to JSTOR directly – and then only a small subset of those. I don't have time or money to establish individual relationships with every source of historical articles or pay them $30 a pop for (say) the ten things I find when I'm researching a story, and the company doesn't have the budget to buy hundreds of subscriptions.

That, exactly, is why JSTOR exists.

I asked JSTOR about this, and was advised to join the British Library – where, if I visit the place, I can get access. As it happens, I live just up the road from the BL and have a reader's card: I'm incredibly lucky. Even so, it's rare to the point of never that it's worthwhile during the early stages of assessing a story to spend the time lumbering in - especially when the odds are that the contribution to a story will be small. Again, research is as much about finding what isn't the case as what is. And I very often provide background info to the news team; they need that data in minutes, not afternoons.

For the vast majority of journalists, finding a local institution prepared to let them in isn't even an option. For those who really, really need it – those in places where the Net may be their only contact with the world of ideas – it's just a bad joke at their expense. (JSTOR is aware of this, and if you're unlucky enough to live in places it judges particularly at need, you can get free access – provided you've got a stable IP address. All access is mediated by IP address, and herein lies the problem).

In case you think this is special pleading, ask any independent researcher. There are a lot of them out there, writing books, building businesses, experimenting with ideas, inventing the future, educating themselves, trying hard to participate in the great human endeavour of standing on the shoulders of giants. They will all have had the experience of finding exactly what they want, only to be told "NO".

It is extraordinarily frustrating, and the exact opposite of JSTOR's laudable aims. Furthermore, it is unthinkable that the situation will continue like this indefinitely. I cannot envision a future where this huge library of public knowledge is forever denied to those who need it. Every sign, every pointer, every tiny eddy in the tide, says otherwise.

The wall is pernicious. Break it down.