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- This essay originally appeared at The Pirate Bay as the description for the torrent of documents. You can see this message and the torrent here: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331
- ------
- This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
- 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
- and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most
- have previously only been made available at high prices through
- paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.
- Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19
- USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
- cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
- at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
- locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
- checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.
- I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
- published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
- profit from controlling access to these works.
- I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.
- On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
- General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
- from JSTOR.
- Academic publishing is an odd system -- the authors are not paid for their
- writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
- and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
- authors must even pay the publishers.
- And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
- expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
- fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
- but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.
- As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
- significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
- "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
- weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.
- Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
- scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
- than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
- are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
- resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
- for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
- the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
- which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
- realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
- benefit by it.
- Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
- to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
- it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
- documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
- scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
- attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
- classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
- with outrageous subscription fees.
- Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
- up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
- creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
- works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
- when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
- threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
- owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.
- Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
- lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.
- These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society -- a prestigious scientific
- journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.
- The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
- prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
- 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.
- The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
- and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
- freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
- viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.
- When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
- Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource -- where they
- could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
- historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
- was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
- the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
- several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
- other papers he authored?)
- But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
- publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
- from the publishers.
- As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
- reproduction -- scanning the documents -- created a new copyright
- interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
- watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
- might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
- the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.
- In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
- the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
- unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
- the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
- legally and morally everyone's property.
- In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
- the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives -- but "free"
- only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
- 100 articles.
- All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
- disseminators of knowledge -- as their lofty mission statements
- suggest -- but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
- they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
- valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
- steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
- on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
- they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence
- competition.
- The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
- inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
- copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
- of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
- paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
- to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
- survival may even depend on it.
- If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
- industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
- then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified -- it will be one
- less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
- lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
- a crime.
- I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
- out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
- probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
- charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
- that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.
- I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
- applications which come of this archive.
- - ----
- Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
- gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb
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