A Fitting Tribute For Aaron Swartz: Researchers Post Free PDFs Of Their Research Online
from the it's-a-start dept
As we noted earlier, one thing that Aaron Swartz would have almost certainly wanted, as a memorial for his own accomplishments, would be for others to continue that work and to do much more with it. It's a small thing, but it's been inspiring to watch one aspect of that come to life: some academic researchers suggested a bit of simple civil disobedience in asking other researchers to post their own research publicly for others to download, and use the tag: #pdftribute. Many researchers quickly jumped at the chance, leading some to set up a website, appropriately called PDFtribute.net to collect all the tweets and the links to all of that research.It's unclear how much of that research is technically "allowed" to be published like this. If you're not familiar with the dirty sausage making of academic research, many journals claim all copyrights on research (despite not paying a dime for it -- and, in some cases, even requiring the researchers or their institutions to pay to submit the papers in the first place). Many then have policies that bar the original researcher from further distributing the work, so it's likely that some of the released research is in violation of those agreements. That said, over the past few years, more and more journals (often due to significant pushback from academics) have recognized how ridiculous this is, and many have started to allow -- either officially or with a nod and a wink -- academics the right to post free copies of their own research on their own website. A few, much more enlightened journals even encourage researchers to post the work.
Either way, if one of the legacies of Aaron Swartz's all-too-short life is to get more people interested in open access to research, and to drive that movement forward, that's a good thing.
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Filed Under: aaron swartz, civil disobedience, knowledge, open access, pdftribute, sharing
Reader Comments
The First Word
“White House Petitions
Prosecutors turned down Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's request for plea deal over MIT hacking case TWO DAYS before his suicidehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262137/Aaron-Swartz-Reddit-founder-request-plea- deal-turned-Massachusetts-prosecutor.html
Lawyer says he warned prosecutors that Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz was suicidal
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262518/Lawyer-says-warned-prosecutors-Reddit-fo under-Aaron-Swartz-suicidal.html
White House petition to fire US Attprney Carmen Ortiz for her misconduct in this case
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-orti z-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
The petition to fire US Attorney Carmen Ortiz has already exceeded the 25,000 signatures needed to get a response from the White House.
Here's a new petition to fire Assistant US Attorney Steve Heymann:
http://wh.gov/Ex1n
White House petition to limit copyrights to a maximum of 10 years
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/shorten-excessive-copyright-terms/XMc72zjc
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coverage on PBS Newshour, interrupted
& I've never seen this many posts on a single topic in a 24 hour period here at Techdirt... Granted, I've only been here for a year...
Anyway, I was watching the PBS Newshour (about 2:30 am Central time), & during a short interview w/ a friend of Aaron's, right at the point where he was explaining it WASN'T what one would consider hacking that he was doing, a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System interrupted, so that the full explanation was inaudible.
There was a short overview once the alert ended, but it seems odd that they chose that moment to have the alert, & that it effectively muted the proper "not really hacking" explanation nearly entirely.
I've come across too many things in life that make me disbelieve in coincidences.
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Re: coverage on PBS Newshour, interrupted
You should really learn how to create one.(even if it's just you, with an automation tool and proxies)
Personal army requests are also useful.
COMPLAIN EN MASSE
GOTO : http://www.pbs.org/newshour/letters.html
TASK : Fill out online email complaint.
Only takes 1 min. Every complaint helps.
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Re: Re: coverage on PBS Newshour, interrupted
I also mentioned that JSTOR had said they'd make 4.5 million articles accessible by the public free (but didn't add the implication that those were probably what Aaron had accessed).
I also checked the Newshours online video, & luckily it has the full interview, unobstructed. So I did at least get to watch the whole thing.
Now that I know exactly what Kevin said, I also commented that it was said that what was done was just an automated process for something legal if done manually.
What really set my red flag was that the test was being done during a News Program/ broadcast, which I thought was always avoided, in addition to the particulars of the case & exactly what was buzzed over.
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WHAT IF... The Torrent Distribution Model was used to host such public endeavors.
With end user DB index, being site side while linking to source.
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That's a lot of separate links to click!
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Re: That's a lot of separate links to click!
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Re: Re: That's a lot of separate links to click!
=)
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Re:
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Re:
A few points:
1. You are confused. What he downloaded was NOT just public domain materials. Earlier he HAD been investigated for downloading public domain court rulings, but the JSTOR stuff included tons of copyrighted materials. After he was arrested, another person, Greg Maxwell DID release a ton of public domain material he had downloaded from JSTOR, but that was different than what Aaron downloaded.
2. There is nothing wrong -- legally or morally -- with profiting from the public domain. It's just that you can't stop others from copying it. Go into any bookstore and pick up a book on Shakespeare. All those publishers are profiting off the public domain and we WANT that because it allows them to publish those books.
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Faculty web pages
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Re: Faculty web pages
"You should read that and that text and you can enter my locker at the university there and there. It is not locked and there is a copy-card attached to the text I want you to read. If you are caught trespassing by the police though..."
I have experienced that analogue equivalent. In all honesty copyright and patents are hinderences to education no matter how much you look at universities as innovation-factories. What is even worse: If you publish a book as a professor, the chances that you will make up an extra week of pay through royalty over 5 years is very slim unless it gets widely popular. I am not saying that it is impossible to make a living off of text-book publishing alone, but you better keep at least 10 books up to date constantly, which in academia is more than a full-time job (and reaching enough recognition to even get a single book relatively popular is a lifetime achievement or a scoop or two of heavily cited research, which to some degree is luck-based and based on your field)...
The sausage of publishing was a necessity in them olden days before the internet. It developed from a "we share notes" society to a business based around prestige in publishing for different papers.
Today the prestige is the only thing making the Elseviers of the world able to take obscene amounts of money. The less prestigious papers will for sure go to a paid repository publishing or FOSS publishing. Now we only need the old prestige to fade enough that they take up at least the repository approach instead of crappy "one year of the paper", "one subject download" and other old and completely unnecessary bundles.
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White House Petitions
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262137/Aaron-Swartz-Reddit-founder-request-plea- deal-turned-Massachusetts-prosecutor.html
Lawyer says he warned prosecutors that Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz was suicidal
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262518/Lawyer-says-warned-prosecutors-Reddit-fo under-Aaron-Swartz-suicidal.html
White House petition to fire US Attprney Carmen Ortiz for her misconduct in this case
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-orti z-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
The petition to fire US Attorney Carmen Ortiz has already exceeded the 25,000 signatures needed to get a response from the White House.
Here's a new petition to fire Assistant US Attorney Steve Heymann:
http://wh.gov/Ex1n
White House petition to limit copyrights to a maximum of 10 years
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/shorten-excessive-copyright-terms/XMc72zjc
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Re: White House Petitions
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Re: Re: White House Petitions
As much as we know e-petitions are complete - as Watson would say - bullshit, Ortiz must know that petition exists now, and the case has been brought to the attention of the highest office. They will and should be watching this development and rethinking their strategy.
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Re: Re: Re: White House Petitions
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EU/UK OPen access initiative
Initially this is being done by bribing the journals (money coming out of the research grant and/or the institution). However I don't believe that this model is sustainable long term.
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Epic win. And remember, sharing is caring!
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self-archiving
Self-archiving is why automated citation management sites like CiteSeerX and Google Scholar work. In fact, if you are scared of some imaginary future retribution against posting on your own page, upload your papers to Google Scholar instead.
Although I too have strong feelings about the death of Aaron Swartz, I feel this attempt at "honoring" him is kind of lame. You should already be making your pdfs available, all the time, and not just doing it now as an act of civil disobedience. For one thing, it's not even civil disobedience.
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