Anti-Piracy Enforcer Degban Publishes Some Info-less Graphics Stating Atlanta Is File Sharingest Place On Earth

from the lies,-damned-lies-and-whatever-the-hell-this-is dept

Degban, the anti-piracy company that once took down comedian Dave Gorman's Flickr account because it thought photos of distinctive typography were actually its client's porn (and then blamed it on being hacked), has put together some very interesting (that's a colloquialism for "??!?") piracy numbers at its site.

Degban's "State of Piracy" page introduces itself with some rather ominous wording about piracy and the importance (and difficulty) of compiling accurate numbers.

When it comes to statistical data regarding content piracy, the complexity of the data and its abundance is utterly mind boggling. The data channels are scattered across geographical borders and scientific dimensions. The nature of the matter effects the data gathering process, resulting in datasets with chaotic orders and unclean results sets.

It is of grave importance, regardless of the challenge, to understand the trends and fashions behind content piracy as a thriving organism . Furthermore, appreciation of statical [sic] data regarding content piracy can be advantageous from a business intelligence point of view.

And some very fine "statical" data it is. The first chart posted is of the pie variety, breaking down the "market share" of several file storage lockers. Most of the contenders hover somewhere between 4-6% of the "market," possibly giving some credence to the MPAA's claims that Megaupload made the Internet go 'round by driving 99% of the traffic that wasn't Netflix (heavily paraphrased).

The data Degban has collected also shows the US firmly holding the lead in terms of "Origins of Pirate Peers." (USA! USA! USA!) How this number (185,290) is derived remains a mystery, but whatever it is, it's nearly nine times as much as Russia (28,001). So... who's doing all this piracy? Atlantans, apparently.


As can be seen by this chart, Atlanta is more than twice as piratey as Tacoma (?!?), the second place pirate haven, in terms of numbers lying along a Y-axis. Again, no further information is provided as to what these numbers represent, but we can certainly assume that Atlanta is the problem and Tacoma isn't helping. Once we venture beyond these two homegrown pirate bays, we see pirating is a major issue in such metropolises as Chalfont, PA and Iselin, NJ. Other cities/villages/unincorporated townships appear on the list as well, leading to questions of "Where is that, exactly?" and "Didn't that one guy used to live there... the serial killer/general store proprietor?" Cities with large populations -- New York and LA -- are pretty far down the list, which might make a lesser anti-piracy company question the quality of its data.

Degban really drives home the "Atlantans heart pirating" point with its next info-less graphic.


From this graphic portrayal of the United States battling a post-adolescent breakout of Venn diagram remnants, we can only draw one conclusion: if piracy is to be stopped, Atlanta has got to go. No more DMCA requests. No more lousy legislation. No more half-assed, self-serving infographics. You kill something by cutting off its head. The MPAA will be able to return millions of bag boys to their copyright-protected jobs just as soon as someone detaches Atlanta from the internet. And, from what I can tell of the map above, at that point, nearly all piracy will have gone away. If only Degban had made this clear earlier, we could have done away with all these lawsuits and focused in on the real piracy cancer: Atlanta.

Now, the numbers contributing to these SHOCKING bar graphs might possibly be found in this detailed, interactive (click over to Degban's site to experience this in all its glory) Google Map, which pinpoints where these "peers" are located, as well as the number of peers operating at each inverted teardrop.


Yes. There are some numbers in there, alright. Some low numbers. In fact, it's tough to find any location with more than 5 "peers." How these scattered points add up to over 10,000 pirating Atlantans is beyond me, especially considering Atlanta itself has no data point at all. None. Zip. Zero. Clearly, Degban processes data in a far advanced way, in which "0" peers means, "more than double the piracy impact of Tacoma, in which Tacoma is the number two piracy center."


You may also want to check out the dates on this map. It looks like the last data harvest was back in the spring of 2010. "OLD NEWS!!!" I hear you yell like a bunch of irate Digg members Redditors. But, how can that be? "Data is important," Degban tells us in the intro, along with this:

This section is regularly and automatically kept up to date.

From the looks of it, "regularly" means "once per decade." And "automatically" means "please delete this word from this sentence before publishing this page."

So, we have a bunch of numbers that don't add up, aren't current and do little more than randomly drop circles on maps and rub bars affectionately up against sky-high Y-axises. And yet, Degban is a well-known name in the piracy world, one that understands the "grave importance" of accurate and up-to-date statistics. To fight your enemy successfully, you must know them, and from what I'm seeing here, Degban is nearly 100% sure someone's pirating stuff somewhere.

Godspeed, number wranglers! Remind me to keep one hand on my content when passing through the muggy climes of Hotlanta or the suicidal murkiness of upstate Washington! And tell Vkontakte.ru that everyone's extremely disappointed in its lack of effort on the file sharing front.

Filed Under: atlanta, data, file sharing, research
Companies: degban

DMCA As Censorship: Chilling Effects On Research

from the make-it-stop dept

Professor Ed Felten, back from his brief foray as the FTC's chief technology officer, has written a fantastic piece for Slate detailing how the DMCA is creating massive chilling effects for researchers. This should come as little surprise, seeing as Felten himself was famously threatened by the recording industry for his research (at their request in the form of a "contest") to hack their DRM. In the article, Felten relates -- as he did a few weeks ago at a conference about the DMCA at Santa Clara University -- that students in his own lab had discovered the infamous Sony Rootkit before it was revealed to the public back in 2005. But, rather than do something about it, the chilling effects set in:

We were worried about the part of the DMCA called 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1), which says that “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [copyright law].” We had to disable the rootkit to detect what it was hiding, and we had to partially disable the software to figure out what it was doing. An angry record company might call either of those steps an act of circumvention, landing us in court. Instead of talking to the public, we talked to our lawyer.

And, because of that, the dangerous rootkit lived on for a bit longer, the public blissfully unaware of the massive security holes they were introducing onto their computers, courtesy of a paranoid RIAA. While it was eventually revealed by another researcher Felten and his students sat on the info for a while (including info on another vulnerability) before eventually releasing the details. That's a clear example of the very real and very dangerous chilling effects of the DMCA. Every time we bring up this concern, maximalists insist that there is no such thing. I'm curious how they explain these examples away.

Felten notes that a bunch of researchers had actually told Congress about this problem back when the bill was first being discussed... and they were mostly ignored:

The research community saw this problem coming and repeatedly asked Congress to amend the bill that would become the DMCA, to create an effective safe harbor for research. There was a letter to Congress from 50 security researchers (including me), another from the heads of major scientific societies, and a third from the leading professional society for computer scientists. But with so much at stake in the act for so many major interests, our voice wasn’t heard. As they say in Washington, we didn’t have a seat at the table.

Congress did give us a research exemption, but it was so narrowly defined as to be all but useless. (So perhaps we did have a seat—at the kids’ table.) I’ll spare you the details, but basically, there is a 116-word section of the Act titled “Permissible Acts of Encryption Research,” and it appears to have been written without consulting any researchers. There may be someone, somewhere, who has benefited from this exemption, but it fails to protect almost all of the relevant research. It didn’t protect Alex and me, because we were investigating spyware that didn’t rely on the mathematical operations involved in encryption.

Congress should fix this, but it seems like there's not much interest in doing so these days, which is unfortunate. While Felten has revealed his situation, we'll never know how many others were similarly stifled, or (worse) how much useful research was never even started because of this kind of risk.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, chilling effects, dmca, ed felten, research, security

DailyDirt: Genetic Discoveries And The Internet

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The internet, which now connects almost everything in the world, has changed every aspect of the way we live, work, and socialize. It has also changed the way we do science, particularly in facilitating the dissemination of research results, but also in enabling scientific discoveries in ways previously unheard of. Here are a few examples of how the internet has affected (and even effected) genetic research.

• The Rare Genomics Institute may have enabled the first crowdfunded gene discovery. Pioneering a new funding model for rare disease research, RGI used crowdfunding to raise $3,550 to help sequence the genes of a 4-year-old girl with a rare genetic disorder, and identify a previously undocumented gene mutation. [url]
• The online game Phylo is tapping gamers from all over the world to help solve the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. The game is designed to take advantage of human visual intelligence to improve the sequence alignment of promoter regions in 521 genes associated with diseases from 44 vertebrate species. So far, the game has produced over 350,000 solutions, with 70% of them being more accurate than the alignments produced by a state-of-the-art computer program called MULTIZ. [url]
• Is it even possible to protect the anonymity of genetic information that has been posted online? Apparently, it isn't that difficult to uncover the identities of people whose DNA has been made public for research purposes. Using an online genealogy service, in addition to information from public records, social networks, and other websites, researchers were able to find 5 out of 10 people in their study, including their relatives, identifying 50 people in total. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biology, biotech, crowdfunding, disease, gamification, genetics, phylo, research, science

DailyDirt: Basic Science Deserves Some Respect

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The National Science Foundation, which funds a lot of basic research at American colleges and universities, is facing a budget cut of $283 million this year, eliminating (up to) ~1,000 research grants. It's a shame because over the years many NSF-funded projects have resulted in discoveries that have turned into commercial products with significant benefits to society. Unfortunately, for people outside the scientific community, it's easy to overlook these impacts when trying to decide where to cut spending. Here are a few examples of why basic science deserves some respect.

• Sad fact: Funding for basic science research makes up less than 1% of the federal budget. Even sadder is that cutting the small amount the government spends on basic science will have little impact on short-term fiscal goals, but its negative effects on the economy will be felt for decades to come, potentially costing the U.S. billions of dollars in missed future opportunities. [url]
• Lasers are an example of how a discovery in basic science can eventually lead to a revolutionary invention. The first laser was built in the 1950s, but practical applications for lasers didn't appear until decades later. Today, lasers are a multi-billion dollar industry and are key to many technologies used in manufacturing, communications, medicine, entertainment, and scientific research. [url]
• Cutting funding for basic science research will impact young investigators the most. Actually, brand new tenure-track professors are somewhat insulated because there's always some money set aside for them. It's the just tenured professors that will feel it the most, as they try to compete for grants against the entire population, which includes Nobel laureates, National Academicians, and more well-established researchers. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: academia, innovation, laser, nsf, policy, research, science, technology, tenure

Expose A Blatant Security Hole In AT&T's Servers, Get 3.5 Years In Jail

from the now-the-holes-will-be-open-longer dept

We've written a few times about the case of Andrew Auernheimer, perhaps better known as weev. While he has a bit of a reputation as an online troll, and self-admitted jerk, his case is yet another example of how ridiculously broken the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) remains. In this case, what he did was expose a pretty blatant security hole in AT&T's servers, that allowed anyone to go in and find the emails of any AT&T iPad owner, merely by incrementing the user ID. This isn't a malicious "hack." It's barely a "hack" at all. This isn't "breaking in." This is just exploring a totally broken system. To call attention to this, weev collected information on a bunch of famous folks who had iPads and alerted the press. This is what security folks do all the time. And for his troubles in helping AT&T discover and close a pretty bad security hole, he's been sentenced to 41 months in prison plus he has to pay $73,000 to AT&T. One hopes AT&T will use it to hire half a decent security person or something.

The sentencing, by the way, was near the top of the "guidelines" the judge had, for those who insisted that the courts in other CFAA cases, such as Aaron Swartz's might be lenient.

Plenty of people -- especially in the security community, are realizing what a ridiculous ruling this is and how dangerous it is. As people are starting to point out, while he may be a jerk, that doesn't mean he's a criminal. The prosecution used chat logs in which Auernheimer and a friend, Daniel Spitler, discussed the effort, and the fact that they talked about harming AT&T's reputation and promoting themselves as security experts. I don't see how that leads to any criminal activity though. AT&T's reputation should be tarnished for having crap security. And why wouldn't some researchers talk about using the discovery of a really bad privacy hole by a major corporation to boost their own credentials. Pretty much anyone in their shoes would reasonably think the same thing.

Prosecutors, of course, played up Auernheimer's history of being a jerk, but that alone has little to do with his actions here:

"His entire adult life has been dedicated to taking advantage of others, using his computer expertise to violate others' privacy, to embarrass others, to build his reputation on the backs of those less skilled than he," wrote U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, who went on to note the "atypical recalcitrance by the defendant to conform to the laws regarding unauthorized computer access."

While that may be true, none of that, by itself, is illegal. And the actions that exposed a glaring hole put in place by bad programmers at AT&T shouldn't be either.

Filed Under: andrew auernheimer, cfaa, hacking, jailtime, research, security, weev
Companies: at&t

White House Orders Federal Agencies To Require More Open Access To Not Just Research, But Data

from the big-news dept

Just a couple days ago, we were talking about the newly proposed FASTR bill, which would require federal agencies with greater than $100 million in research funds to require the end results of that research to be published in open ways within six months of publication. As we've noted, for years, the NIH (National Institute for Health) has had a plan that says all the research it funds needs to be published via open access after 12 months.

However, before anything happened with FASTR, it appears that the White House has stepped in to more or less push a fairly similar agenda via a White House policy memo. This comes in response to one of those We The People... petitions (which we had suggested you support). Dr. John Holdren, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained this rather big change in policy pretty clearly:

I have issued a memorandum today (.pdf) to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication. As you pointed out, the public access policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health has been a great success. And while this new policy call does not insist that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, it does ensure that similar policies will appear across government.

The interesting part is that, while this plan has the same 12 month delay as the NIH plan, rather than the 6 months in FASTR, it looks like the White House is really pushing agencies to go further. They're not just asking for the papers to be open access, but the more useful data as well:

In addition to addressing the issue of public access to scientific publications, the memorandum requires that agencies start to address the need to improve upon the management and sharing of scientific data produced with Federal funding. Strengthening these policies will promote entrepreneurship and jobs growth in addition to driving scientific progress. Access to pre-existing data sets can accelerate growth by allowing companies to focus resources and efforts on understanding and fully exploiting discoveries instead of repeating basic, pre-competitive work already documented elsewhere. For example, open weather data underpins the forecasting industry and provides great public benefits, and making human genome sequences publically available has spawned many biomedical innovations—not to mention many companies generating billions of dollars in revenues and the jobs that go with them. Going forward, wider availability of scientific data will create innovative economic markets for services related to data curation, preservation, analysis, and visualization, among others.

That part is big news, though most people will only focus on the open access to publications part. As he states, open access to data really helps power all sorts of interesting companies and research. In the past, publications have often tried to claim copyright over the data produced by experiments as well (even though you technically can't claim copyright over pure data). I've heard of researchers who have had to redo their own experiments because they had signed away the "rights" to their own data from previous experiments. That's not just wasteful, it's insane. Requiring open access to data is a massive step in the right direction. Kudos to the White House for doing this.

Next up: can we get them to realize the same thing should apply to patents on federally funded research as well, and that such things should not be allowed? Or is that just asking too much?

Filed Under: data, federally funded, open access, research, white house

DailyDirt: Where In The Brain?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The US government has announced it's going to fund a massive amount of brain research. The brain has been studied for a long time, but there have been some false starts such as phrenology. With modern science and technology, we might be able to understand a bit more about how brains work. Here are just a few tidbits on our gray matter.

• The Brain Activity Map project could cost billions of dollars, and lots of people are looking back at the Human Genome Project as an example for how government funded science can work. Assigning accurate economic benefits from scientific projects can be debated, but funding science is usually a good investment... [url]
• Data from 182 Vietnam vets with brain injuries have helped to map intelligence in the brain. A significant amount of brain mapping has come from studying injured or abnormal brains, but hopefully, newer imaging techniques will allow researchers to look at normally-functioning brains to better understand how people actually think. [url]
• There are a bunch of TED talks about the brain. The human brain is incredibly complex, so there's a lot that can be said about it, but there's even more that we don't know yet. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: brain, brain activity map project, neuroscience, research, science, tedtalks

How PeerJ Is Changing Everything In Academic Publishing

from the moving-prestige-to-open-access dept

Has there ever been a business more ripe for disruption than academic publishing? For anyone who's not been following along, the business model of academic publishers, built on solving 18th century distribution problems, incarnates the Shirky Principle: that "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." Far from making research public, as the name "publisher" suggests, their business now works by accepting researchers' donations of manuscripts, refining them by other researchers' donations of editorial services and peer review, assuming copyright, and locking up the results -- work that they neither wrote, edited, reviewed or paid for -- behind paywalls. By artificially causing a scarcity problem, they're able to sell solutions to that problem: subscriptions.

But publishers are monopoly suppliers of the journals they publish, and, like so many monopolists, have been unable to resist gouging their customers. Between 1996 and 2010, journal subscription prices rose at four times the rate of inflation. The result is that each published paper now costs the academic world more than $5000. Prices are so extreme that even Harvard, the wealthiest university in the world, recently declared that it can't afford to keep paying all its subscriptions. Not only can the public which funded the work not access it: often, neither can the researchers who need it as a basis for new work. It's insane. Academic publishers have made themselves the enemies of science.

The solution to the ludicrous satus quo is open-access publishing. Researchers (or more realistically their funders or institutions) pay publishers an up-front fee for their services, and the resulting papers are then freely available to anyone in the world. Everyone outside of profiteering publishers agrees that this is a much better approach, but lots of researchers balk at the prices of article processing charges (APCs). For example, Elsevier, the biggest of the established academic publishers, asks authors for $3000. Newer open-access-only publishers, such as the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLOS) charge a less shocking $1350 for publication in their main journal, PLOS ONE, and offer a no-questions-asked waiver for authors without funding for this charge. But there is still a feeling that $1350 is a lot of money to charge for Internet publication, especially when peer-review is done by volunteers.

Against that backdrop, Pete Binfield, the managing editor of PLOS ONE, left what had become the world's largest journal to launch a new publishing startup with Jason Hoyt, late of social reference manager Mendeley. High on the list of their goals was to bring down the price of open-access publishing.

I think a lot of people would have been impressed had PeerJ managed to bring the APC down below the $1000 mark, or certainly had they managed to hit $500. Instead, they've gone for the jugular on pricing: as the web-site says, "If we can set a goal to sequence the human genome for $99, when why not $99 for scholarly publishing"?

PeerJ's pricing system is different from the approach other publishers have taken, focusing on membership. Your $99 buys you lifetime membership, which gives you the right to publish one paper a year with them at no further charge. (All co-authors on multi-authored papers need to be members.) Alternatively, $299 buys an all-you-can-eat membership: publish as many papers as you want, whenever you want, for life.

The audacity of this pricing model is rather a shock. I have to admit that I was skeptical that it could work -- that PeerJ could take enough money to survive on this model. What swayed me was learning that the seed capital had been put up by Tim O'Reilly, who probably knows and understands more about the commercial realities of publishing in the 21st century than anyone alive. Throw in Pete Binfield, whose experience in editing mega-journals is literally second to none, and you have a true dream-team.

But what impresses me most is that PeerJ's low APC is not what most excites its founders -- in fact, it doesn't even make the top four. In an interview published a few days ago, Binfield and Hoyt answered the question "what do you think makes PeerJ an attractive publishing target for scholars?" in an unexpected way:

First of all, we intend to make rapid first decisions, and publish articles as promptly and effectively as possible... Secondly, we will be integrating a pre-print server into our offering ... Thirdly, we believe that the act of submitting a paper should be as pain-free as possible ... Fourthly, we are encouraging reviewers to provide their names when reviewing, and we are encouraging authors to publicly reproduce their peer review history on the published paper ... Fifthly we are significantly cheaper than a 'typical' OA journal.

It's not enough for PeerJ to drop prices by an order of magnitude. They're also out to speed up the famously slow publication process, make in-review manuscripts visible, smooth authors' path through the whole process and, most crucially, open up the opaque and mysterious process of peer-review. The importance of this last goal can hardly be overstated. At most journals, the acceptance or rejection of articles is done behind closed doors by referees whose reviews are never seen except by a select few, whose identities are often hidden, and who are insulated from the consequences -- positive or negative -- of their contribution. That has to change, and it's great that PeerJ is taking it on.

PeerJ launched in June 2012 and opened for submissions in December. Today, the first batch of articles is published. I submitted a paper, co-written with Matt Wedel, on the day PeerJ opened, and I am pleased to say that it made it into the initial batch. We're delighted that our work is now available to the world; but also privileged to have had a preview of the PeerJ process.

Because if we thought that the low price meant corner-cutting, we were dead wrong. As others have noted, the submission process is a joy in comparison to hacking through the late-1990s-themed submission systems of most journals. Our paper was handled by an academic editor of the highest reputation, efficiently and fairly. It was reviewed swiftly by two referees, one of whom gave particularly detailed and helpful feedback. When we got the proof PDF we were taken aback by how good it looks compared with the printed-page facsimiles most journals produce. And when we sent the proof back with numerous changes, they got a second proof out to us within days. In fact, the whole process from submission through to publication has taken only ten weeks -- unheard of in academic publishing.

So where next for PeerJ, now that its up and running? It's perfectly obvious that it's a much better choice than traditional journals in every rational respect. But so much depends on that slipperiest of beasts, prestige. While young researchers are certain to flock to PeerJ, some more senior academics are likely to look down their nose at the new kid on the block, not quite trusting it and preferring to stick to the venues they've become used to.

If we're going to sort out the absurd mess that academic publishing has got itself into, much depends on the reputation of innovative open-access journals like PeerJ. PLOS ONE has won itself some standing, but it took several years to reach this point after a launch that was met with a lot of skepticism. Hopefully PLOS ONE's success will have opened up a trail for PeerJ to follow, and its intrinsic quality will be recognized more quickly. Certainly PeerJ has the necessary names behind it: not just Binfield and O'Reilly, but an academic advisory board with five Nobel laureates and a huge editorial board packed with respected researchers.

Harvard's memo about being unable to pay subscriptions included a list of nine things its staff, students and librarians could do to change the current publishing system. The second is key: "submit articles to open-access journals ... move prestige to open access". PeerJ, along with PLOS ONE and other new open-access initiatives such as eLIFE and The Open Library of Humanities offer top-quality options for publishing research. Now it's up to researchers to use them.

Filed Under: journals, new models, open access, research

Oh Wait: MIT Already Made All Its Research Open; So Why Was It So Against Aaron Swartz?

from the horrifying dept

We recently picked up on a suggestion by Farhad Manjoo over at Slate that MIT should make all of its research open access as an apology for assisting in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Some people in our comments, reacting angrily against this idea, noted that faculty could not be forced to make their works open access by an administration. Well, it turns out that it's already happening. Daniel Hawkins pointed out that MIT faculty unanimously agreed that all its faculty members would release their works under an open access policy... back in 2009.

The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.

This is a good policy, and one you would hope that other universities would adopt as well.

But, in light of the situation with Aaron Swartz, it just makes it that much more baffling why MIT helped push the case forward and, despite repeated requests to do so, failed to join JSTOR in asking the feds to drop the case. Here is MIT, a school that has widely embraced both the hacker culture and the widespread and free dissemination of academic research, and it helped push forward and supported a massively over-aggressive campaign by the Justice Department against Aaron for embracing the same principles the school itself publicly supports. It's incredible, baffling... and disappointing.

Filed Under: aaron swartz, mit, open access, research

MIT Should Make All Its Research Open Access In Honor Of Aaron Swartz

from the a-step-in-the-right-direction dept

We've discussed a few different efforts to continuing the work that Aaron Swartz started -- and Farhad Manjoo over at Slate has a good suggestion specifically for MIT: it should make its own academic research open for all, while also working with other top universities to do the same. Of course, MIT is in the middle of a self-investigation into its role in the Aaron Swartz prosecution, as many people familiar with the case have said that it helped prosecutors, and drove the case forward, rather than recognizing that Swartz's actions were not criminal and, at the very least, fit with MIT's overall culture (even though Swartz was not a student there).

If MIT truly wants to atone for joining the federal case against Swartz, it should do something much grander: It should pledge to spend its money, prestige, and moral authority to launch a multiuniversity campaign to free every scholarly article from behind pay-wall archives like JSTOR. In other words, MIT should pledge to finish the project Swartz started.

Making academic articles available to everyone is one of the most direct ways for MIT to fulfill its public-spirited mission to expand the world’s access to knowledge.

This is not a crazy idea at all -- especially for MIT. While lots of colleges and universities are now putting full courses online, MIT was really the first big university to do exactly that, announcing plans to put all of its courseware online for free way back in 2001. Is it really such a stretch to seek to do the same thing for research as well? Manjoo even has some good suggestions for how it could go about doing this logistically, pulling ideas from a few others, mainly Michael Eisen::

MIT could stop the whole business with a few bold steps. First, it should declare that, within three years’ time, its libraries will cease subscribing to all academic journals and archives that do not make their articles available online to everyone. Second, MIT should require all of its faculty, grad students, and other affiliated researchers to submit their work only to open-access journals. Third, MIT should instruct its deans and other officials to no longer look favorably upon the mere fact of publication in a “prestigious” journal when making hiring and tenure decisions. Instead, promotions should be based on the quality of a person’s work, wherever it’s been published. (This sounds obvious, but most people in academia will tell you that where you publish is just as important as what you publish.)

Finally and perhaps most importantly, MIT should encourage other universities to participate in this effort. Specifically, it should establish a fund that pays for the true costs of publishing academic journals. Call it the Aaron Swartz Memorial Open-Access Fund. Instead of paying exorbitant subscription fees to for-profit journals, universities would instead contribute to the fund. (The amount would be a function of a school’s size and research budget.) Journals would draw from the fund according to how often their work is accessed. It’s not unlike the compulsory license system that pays musicians when their work is covered or played on the radio, except instead of allowing for more poppy renditions of Elvis tunes, this fund would let anyone in the world access any academic article at any time.

This move seems almost too reasonable for it to actually happen. It matches with MIT's efforts in other areas. It would drive forward one of Aaron's key efforts, and it would act as a serious mea culpa for any role that the university did play in his prosecution.

Filed Under: aaron swartz, education, open access, research
Companies: mit