Steal This Research Paper! (You Already Paid for It.)

[Coyotl]

It is "a moral imperative," Swartz wrote, to "fight back" against "this private theft of public culture."

Steal This Research Paper! (You Already Paid for It.)
Before Aaron Swartz became the open-access movement's first martyr, Michael Eisen was blowing up the lucrative scientific publishing industry from within.

— by Michael Mechanic | http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/09/michael-eisen-plos-open-access-aaron-swartz
September/October 2013 Issue

ON A FRIGID DAY in January 2011, a surveillance camera captured footage of a young man sneaking into a wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Once inside, he retrieved a laptop he'd plugged into the university's network. He then cracked the door to make sure the coast was clear and split, covering his face with a bicycle helmet to conceal his identity.

Over the previous several months, according to a subsequent federal indictment, Aaron Swartz—internet prodigy, RSS co-inventor, Reddit co-creator, and a fellow at the Center for Ethics at Harvard—had stolen nearly 5 million academic articles, including about 1.7 million copyrighted scientific papers held by JSTOR (as in "journal storage&quot , a digital clearinghouse whose servers were accessible via the MIT net.

To Swartz and his supporters in the "open access" movement, this was a noble crime. The taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world's largest funder of biomedical research. Researchers are not paid for the articles they write for scholarly journals, nor for the time and expertise they donate by peer-reviewing and serving on editorial boards. Yet the publishers claim copyright to the researchers' work and charge hefty fees for access to it. (The average subscription to a biology journal costs $2,163.) It is "a moral imperative," Swartz argued in his 2008 "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto," that students, scientists, and librarians download and disseminate copyrighted scientific research to "fight back" against "this private theft of public culture."

Swartz had intended to place the pilfered papers on file-sharing networks, free for the taking. Instead, he was arrested ..........

[Jackpine Radical]

1. I wrote something on that topic a while back, to wit:

I'm a psychologist, and have to do a fair amount of reading in order to keep up with my field--reading that requires access to professional journals. Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to get to the journals I need because I am a private practitioner with no academic affiliation. I do have access to some journals because of (expensive) memberships in professional societies, but there are many journals I cannot get to online. As a result, I end up having to submit individual article requests to libraries, write to authors for reprints, beg copies of articles off colleagues, etc.

There are starting to appear some open-access, peer-reviewed online journals. This is a development I heartily applaud. I hope this trend becomes the norm for scientific and professional publishing in the future.

In the meantime, however, in most cases we're stuck with the old model of journals put out by for-profit publishing houses and the consequent profit-driven limitations to access. I don't mean to denigrate the profit system per se, but the restricted nature of primary-source scientific information pisses me off, especially when I consider that my tax dollars go to support much of the research to which I am being denied access. But beyond that, I think everyone should have access to this kind of public information. Why should a poor person be blocked from knowledge easily available to the oppressor class?

There has to be a better way to finance the journals. For example, why not add a small amount onto each research grant sufficient to pay for the dissemination of the findings of the research? Or, for those rare research projects without public or corporate financing, perhaps some scheme for government subsidization of publication. Any journal that publishes publicly financed research should be reimbursed from public funds for publishing the results of the research. Seems like a simple and nearly perfect solution to me.