There’s a couple of (possibly separate) issues here about intellectual property and the cost and funding of scholarship.

(1) You’re right to be dubious about a “business” that approaches you for a donation of material that you’ve collected and organized, funded by someone else for which you won’t get anything in return. So it really is a donation, not an exchange.

(2) Ownership does matter in cases like this. Is someone else going to out and create a duplicate to compete with Aluka? Not likely. But not impossible. Who’d have thought there would be multiple companies willing to digitize newspapers and census microfilm. But there are, and that’s possibly beneficial. It won’t work for digitizing “old stuff” for which there is not a Western genealogical interest.

Anyway, the situation you are describing is a classic case of potential contractual “hold-up.” Aluka owns a very specific asset for which there is a very specific group of customers.

(3) Large scale distribution of scholarly material has a different cost structure with the internet, but it ain’t free. The larger collections get, and the more you want to add features to save users time, the less free it’s going to be. Good programmers cost money, and good programmers who understand how to make a website work for academics are worth paying for.

Or, alternatively, why shouldn’t I just put links to .pdfs of interview transcripts off of a weblog or college server, under a Creative Commons license, and urge all scholars in a given field to do the same? I can think of some pressing reasons not to do so: the non-standardization of formats and archival information that would result, the uneven vetting of documents which might introduce active fraud or distortion that would be difficult to track down, the unreliability of finding a given source at the same location after citing and using it, and so on.

But thinking about that possibility reminds me that: a) distribution can be close to free, and in some media or some contexts, is effectively free. b) editing in this case is, or could be, almost entirely on the side of the researchers. I don’t think they’re prepared to deal with donations of raw and unedited tapes, for example, though I could be wrong. c) Cataloging is getting close to free if you give pride of place to folksonomies and have vigorous search architectures.

I’m just wondering why we so quickly accept the peculiarities here. Why should we bear the costs of creating information and then the costs of consuming information as well? How long would a business that had an R&D division which then gave away all its R&D to someone else and then bought back the results at high cost survive? There are some examples of that (XeroxPARC and its many early innovations) but they’re not exactly seen as great moments in the history of innvoation.

If we’re looking for an in-between, how about this: why not something rather like the logic of a peer-to-peer network as an incentive to donation? Set a minimum level of donation and a minimum standardized format for an archival donation (standard metadata, standard format) that the researcher is responsible for preparing. That donation gives the institution and the researcher free access to the archive in question for X years (5, 10?) per unit of donated archival material. Broaden that out to records and archival documents in the public domain: any researcher willing to undertake transcription for free of such documents earns their institution access for a set length of time. Host and distribute these archives at all participating institutions so as to distribute those costs; the variant Creative Commons license in this case would specify that the hosting institution only has rights to host for the period of time that their donations of material permit. That would cut some of the bigger private vendors and publishers out of the racket of ransacking public records and historical archives, while also incentivizing the work of digitization further.

About the only thing I get out of this donation at the moment is assisting institutions in Africa. To be honest, even with that, I’d like to see some reciprocity. Some universities in Africa aggressively help any and all researchers gain access to local materials; others do their best to impede or frustrate researchers. Aluka looks to me to be entirely quid and no quo, and I think academia is already suffering enormously from free give-aways of information to institutions who impede the free circulation of information and knowledge.

If you think the resulting archive would be of value to you and others, then you’re probably not going to come by a more honest, and low-cost middleman than a Mellon-funded project. (And this said by somebody who gave them a lot of grief about their early iterations of ArtStor.)

If there’s anything odd about the licensing terms, chances are they’re that way because some really important IP holder insisted on specific terms. That’s certainly true about some of the terms that were involved in the earlier projects (JStor, ArtStor).

As a side note to this discussion: I am a freelance copy editor, among other things, mostly working with tech and IT-related stuff, but I have an MA in history from my abortive academic career that I’ve always been itching to do something with that would make me feel like those five semesters weren’t totally wasted. I once met the editor of a medieval studies journal and was quite keen on doing freelance work for them — even would have been willing to take a pay cut — until I found out that they paid in … copies of the journal.

The editorial costs are probably largely nil, is what I’m saying.