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My lab:
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Scholarly publishing is FUBAR. Everyone knows and and everyone I know and talk to is extremely frustrated with it. Hardly a day goes by without someone complaining, cursing or shaking a fist. In the last two or three years, things have gotten so bad, that the word 'revolution' was uttered seriously, not in jest. News in the last 24h are starting to look like some people may have started to try and kick off just that.

As briefly mentioned before, I support Aaron Swartz in his struggle against the US federal government after his 'Robin Hood'action of liberating 4.8 million scholarly articles for the tax-payer. In addition to the campaign started by his own organization, Demand Progress, now a person who calls himself Greg Maxwell has launched his own paper libreation in support of Aaron Swartz. Greg Maxwell downloaded an archive containing over 18,000 scientific papers from the academic journal database JSTOR and uploaded it to The Pirate Bay, where the archive is now available as a torrent.

I love that Greg Maxwell accompanied the archive with a manifesto. For instance, he writes there:
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.
I also like what software engineer Kevin Webb had to say about Swartz's action:
Aaron's arrest should be a wake up call to universities - evidence of how fundamentally broken this core piece of their architecture remains despite decades of progress in advancing communication and collaboration.The MIT staff who called the FBI would have been served better by calling the chancellor to ask, 'How have we created a system that forces 25 year-olds to sneak around in the basement, hiding hard-drives in closets in order ask basic and important questions about our work? Can't we do better?
I seriously doubt that this is the start of a revolution, but if it is, I'm supporting it! What could be the next step? Should we now all start to download every paper our libraries provide us access to? I'm not sure this would be feasible nor would we get enough people to do it.

Instead, why not start a campaign to get every scientist to upload their own, personal PDF copies everyone has for their own use available to the public? Maybe at first as a torrent, maybe later, with some technological support, in a searchable archive? Would that be a good idea? Civil disobedience has worked many times before...

I'll close with another Maxwell quote:
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.
Posted on Thursday 21 July 2011 - 23:57:05 comment: 0
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