The Good News: You Can Download Hawking's PhD For Free; The Bad News: It Took 50 Years To Make It Happen

from the why-are-we-waiting? dept

Techdirt has been writing about the (slow but steady) rise of open access for a decade. That's as long as the Annual International Open Access Week has been running. Cambridge University came up with quite a striking way to join in the celebrations:

Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis, 'Properties of expanding universes', has been made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, after being made accessible via the University of Cambridge's Open Access repository, Apollo.

The 1966 doctoral thesis by the world's most recognisable scientist is the most requested item in Apollo with the catalogue record alone attracting hundreds of views per month. In just the past few months, the University has received hundreds of requests from readers wishing to download Professor Hawking's thesis in full.

The idea has been quite a hit -- literally, since the demand for Hawking's thesis was so great on Monday, that it hit the Apollo server hard enough to take it offline for a while. The Guardian reported:

A University of Cambridge spokesperson said: "We have had a huge response to Prof Hawking's decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download, with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours.

"As a result, visitors to our Open Access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable."

Popular as the 1966 PhD has proved, the point of the exercise was to spread the word about open access. Hawking is quoted as saying:

Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.

Cambridge University made a further announcement to mark Open Access Week. Dr Arthur Smith, Deputy Head of Scholarly Communication, said:

From October 2017 onwards, all PhD students graduating from the University of Cambridge will be required to deposit an electronic copy of their doctoral work for future preservation. And like Professor Hawking, we hope that many students will also take the opportunity to freely distribute their work online by making their thesis Open Access. We would also invite former University alumni to consider making their theses Open Access, too.

That's great, as is the free availability of Hawking's PhD. But the question for both has to be: why has it taken so long -- 50 years in the case of the thesis? Even allowing for the fact that the Internet was not a mass medium for 30 of those 50 years, there was nothing stopping Cambridge University putting PhDs online from the mid-1990s. Similarly, why make depositing theses as open access optional? The University would be quite justified in requiring the thesis of any PhD it grants to be online and freely downloadable immediately under a suitable CC license. The moment to make that happen is now, not in another 10 years' time.

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Filed Under: access to knowledge, knowledge, open access, phd, stephen hawking, thesis

Former NSA Official Thinks A Blog Containing Nothing But His Own Tweets Is 'Defamatory'

from the hilariously,-falsely-accusing-someone-of-defamation-is-defamatory dept

Many people have varying ideas as to what exactly composes defamatory content. Some mistake statements of opinion ("this product sucks") for defamation. Some feel anything that doesn't describe their products or services in glowing terms is defamatory. Some feel any sort of criticism is defamation, even if the criticism is based on known facts.

But John Schindler (whose strange foray into Wikileaks/Snowden conspiracy theories we've covered here previously), former NSA officer and holder of a PhD in history (just ask him!) has gone far beyond any of these misperceptions. According to him, things he actually said are defamatory if published by a third party.

I have no idea how someone as self-assuredly brilliant as John Schindler would make this error but here's the chain of events. Schindler routinely berates anyone who questions his claims, calling them "stupid" and refusing to advance the argument past endless appeals to his own authority (the aforementioned PhD). Someone took notice of Schindler's tactics and crafted a Tumblr blog containing nothing but screenshots of actual Schindler tweets.

Here's a few of the tweets just to give you an idea of both Schindler's "conversational" patterns and the blog's content.

So, if there's anything unflattering contained here, it's Schindler's own tweets. Oh, and this amazing banner.



But when someone brought this blog to his attention, this was his response.

An ugly new defamation site against me has popped up. Why is @peterrneumann pimping it so hard? Like to know. pic.twitter.com/AGws5A1HPy

— John Schindler (@20committee) March 17, 2014

A few other Twitter users, despite being on Schindler's side, pointed out that there was nothing defamatory about collecting and posting Schindler's own words. So, Schindler doubled down.

Nice defamation / RT @PeterRNeumann 24m @EvansRyan202 @dandrezner The real John Schindler: worth looking at: http://t.co/BPaRmJ7njx

— John Schindler (@20committee) March 17, 2014

This, of course, resulted in more derision, including a repurposed movie quote from a very familiar hat.

.@20committee "Defamation." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

— Popehat (@Popehat) March 18, 2014

All the PhDs in the world aren't going to save you from having your own direct quotes turned against you. If anything, it only confirms what Schindler's critics believe: that he's pompous, arrogant and unwilling to actually engage in a debate. Instead, he prefers to belittle anyone who doesn't hold a precious PhD in history, using his doctorate to paper over any flaws in arguments.

I can't imagine it's much fun to see your Twitter feed boiled down to little more than shouts of "stupid!" and continuous pointing to a framed piece of paper, but whether Schindler likes it or not, those are his words and those are his go-to rhetorical devices. For someone who frequently uses the hashtag #caring to show his contempt for the ire he provokes, he certainly can't seem to take having his own abuse heaped on his Carebear-surrounded head.

Filed Under: appeal to authority, defamation, i've got a phd and you don't, john schindler, nsa, phd, thin skin