I request that Esri provide an option for authors to download the HTML code files for their work in Story Maps. I am a professor who publishes academic articles and digital scholarship in peer-reviewed academic journals and through academic presses. I would like to publish a Story Map that I've composed using Esri Story Maps (through my university's paid Esri license) in a peer-reviewed online journal in my field that hosts all published content on their own servers for sustainability. Publishing and sharing via this academic venue would make the Story Map available to many more and different kinds of readers and users, and it would be a prestigious location for an Esri Story Map to be published, providing more exposure for the author and for Esri products.
This journal requires standalone HTML files in order for digital work to be considered for publication and eventually published. As the editor wrote to me, "we wouldn’t be able to just embed the original using an embed code—we’d need to host all files on our servers and accounts for sustainability purposes (so that we don’t have to scramble to do something if StoryMaps goes down in 5, 10, or 20 years—or lose everything if we don’t know a change is happening)." Authors, journals, and libraries have no control over the sustainability of work in Story Maps in the current model where Esri does not allow for the downloading or editing of HTML files.
Providing access to HTML code files would give authors a way to save and archive their work (which is their intellectual property), and open up publishing options for authors who would like to share their work via journals or presses who host work on their servers - authors like me.
In addition to aiding in sustainably publishing and sharing Esri Story Maps in more places, giving authors access to the HTML code of Story Maps would provide more options for editing and altering templates in productive and creative ways. I was interested in adding drop-down menus to my Story Map, for example, but learned that this feature could not be added, nor could I gain access to the html code to make the changes there (see my post asking about drop-down menus here).
I have valued using Story Maps as a composing tool, and I hope that my work can be published and shared in its current version - which looks and sounds fantastic. Esri's policies surrounding the inability for authors to access the code, however, may make it impossible to share my work through Esri in the end.
Thank you for your consideration and any help you can offer.
Dr. Crystal VanKooten
Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures
Michigan State University
