Leaked JSTOR Articles on TPB

[mdegges]

In the wake of Aaron Swartz's suicide, Greg Maxwell released an archive of "18,592 scientific publications totalling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society." Attached to his torrent, he wrote an article on what a lot of people are now calling copyright corruption:

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling

33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most

have previously only been made available at high prices through

paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19

USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as

cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article

at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to

locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a

checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I

published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who

profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney

General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers

from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd system—the authors are not paid for their

writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),

and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the

authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously

expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access

fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,

but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

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.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary

scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather

than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They

are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the

resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask

for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on

the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to

which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they

realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would

benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed

to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending

it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic

documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid

scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their

attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has

classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions

with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give

up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for

creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more

works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,

when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use

threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly

owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and

lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—a prestigious scientific

journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published

prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some

18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,

and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available

freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's

viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to

Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource— where they

could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting

historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus

was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at

the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the

several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of

other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:

publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation

from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish

reproduction—scanning the documents— created a new copyright

interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial

watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They

might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained

the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover

the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only

unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and

the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is

legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,

the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives—but "free"

only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about

100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not

disseminators of knowledge—as their lofty mission statements

suggest—but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing

they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are

valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one

steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word

on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value

they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence

competition.

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.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous

industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,

then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified—it will be one

less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent

lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers

a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed

out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would

probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous

charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe

that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful

applications which come of this archive.

- ----

Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011

[email protected] Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

[Eiuol]

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover

the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only

unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and

the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is

legally and morally everyone's property.

Some guy who is cranky about intellectual property. Maintaining databases requires more money than people would intuitively believe. Usually it sounds like students who don't work in scientific fields are complaining about the lack of free access to scientific papers, but those who actually use the papers probably have access already through the schools they work for. That's what universities are good for: they help pay for the progress of knowledge, and many do that. Swartz was complaining about things not being free, but he had access through MIT? I suppose he'd claim it's a great injustice, so he's just dealing with a corrupt system in his eyes, but there is no injustice going on, because it costs *money* to maintain databases so that they'll be useful.

[bluecherry]

Do you, mdegges, have anything in particular about this you would like to ask or discuss? There's a whoooole lot of areas where I can point out mistakes by the writer of that thing, but mostly it is just listing specific applications to this instance of principles that have been discussed a lot on here, so I'd like to avoid writing a lot of stuff that would end up being of no further use to anybody.

[Dante]

Well he views copyright as some utilitarian trading off of rights in order to incentivize authors, so he's operating from a false underlying view of copyrights in the first place. However, I don't think he's wrong that many journals are outrageously priced and that such prices survive through inertia from a now-dead business model. Part of the reason for such inertia is that most academics don't pay anything for access to these journals, as he says; it is paid for by their universities, and researchers face no marginal cost for access. This generally makes it more expensive for people outside the system to buy access on an individual basis. It's the same phenomenon that underlies part of the ballooning cost of health care; most people are paid for through the insurance system, and people who don't have insurance end up paying very high out-of-pocket costs.

He's also right about the terrible negotiating position that new academics find themselves in when it comes to publishing their work. It would be nice if, when I publish an economics paper, it is accessible to the general public for free. However, my foremost concern is publishing the paper in a journal with a good reputation, especially since all of the people in my field will be able to read it for free through their institutions anyways. The reputation capital of these journals enables them to attract quality papers regardless of how much they charge outsiders.

The solution, however, is not for some rogue academic to publish a bunch of papers illegally on his website. The solution is one that this author indicates and then dismisses as unlikely; namely, that older, more established researchers push journals to make their work accessible at a lower price. He dismisses this because he seems to think of academics in two classes; junior faculty working to get established and senior faculty who are already established and are simply coasting for the rest of their careers. This behavior on the part of a senior faculty member might be fine if they have tenure and are okay with coasting, but it's certainly not enough to stay relevant in their field over the course of a career. Indeed, most established faculty with a bit of reputation capital themselves still wish to publish quality work in good journals, and they have the ability to push for change in the industry.

Ultimately, the reputation capital of a journal is not self-sustaining over the long term; it needs quality papers to stay relevant, and many of these will come from researchers with some name recognition and reputation themselves. If these researchers push for industry change (and they have some reason to), it will happen. Just don't expect it to happen quickly.

[ruveyn1]

Swarts was in breach (allegedly) of 4 federal statutes. Now, if he were a virtuous practicer of Civil Disobedience to protest these laws then he would have stood to accept the penalty of these laws. That is the rule for honorable civil disobedience. If the laws were grossly unjust, his being penalized would have created enough public indignation to get the laws repealed. Afterward, the courts could have reduced his sentence to time served (if jail were involved) or canceling any fines levied against him. However he chose suicide. By the way, the Justice Department has vacated all charges against Aaron.

ruveyn1