Open Access à la Pirate Bay

Nieuws | de redactie
26 juli 2011 | Open access booms. To American activists, this development is not going fast enough. First, Aaron Swartz hacked JSTOR’s archives and downloaded 4.800.000 scientific articles leading to his subsequent arrest. A Wikipedia editor protested and published 19.000 research papers via an infamous file sharing website.

Open access platforms gain more and more traction. Gregory Maxwell, internet activistand Wikipedia editor, interpreted open access in his own fashionand published 19.000 scientific articles on The Pirate Bay, awell-known file sharing website accused of infringing copyrights ofbooks, music and movies. His actions allegedly were a protest tothe recent detainment of Aaron Swartz in the US last week.

Swartz used guest access to the MIT library to download over4.800.000 copyrighted articles from JSTOR, a main publisher ofscientific articles. To achieve this, he used a program that lethim automatically save data on a hard drive from JSTOR’s archive.The two laptops employed were hidden in a closet of MIT’sfacilities. The publisher reacted by blocking the access of MIT toits archives for a couple of weeks.

Now, Swartz was detained over charges of computer fraud, wirefraud, “unlawfully obtaining information from,” and “recklesslydamaging a protected computer”. In a public statement, JSTORdeclined that it had filed these charges against Swartz since thepublisher was able to secure all content and did not find anyevidence that he had illegally published the data.

Internet Activism for Open Access

Swartz himself is well known in the online community as activistand wunderkind having contributed to the design of RSS by the ageof 14. Later on, he studied one year at Stanford only to leaveagain and engage in a number of projects and political groupsinvolving open access, e.g. Open Library and DemandProgress.

Gregory Maxwell himself follows similar convictions. In hisWikipedia profile, he stated: “I strongly believe that no personcan be considered a free person if he is unable to study,transform, share, and build upon an enormous library of theintellectual works of others.” His criticism was directed at JSTORwho he believes is over-charging for its content while authors,peer reviewers and even editors receive little in return.

“[The research papers] should be available to everyone at nocost, but most have previously only been made available at highprices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR. Limited access tothe 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 wouldcost hundreds of thousands of dollars.[…]”

JSTOR already responded to the criticism by stating that “thereare costs associated with digitizing, preserving, and providingaccess to content” and that these would well justify the pricescharged. Whether Maxwell will share Swartz’ fate and go to prisonstill remains to be seen. The articles he published were all datedbefore 1923 and consequently had no copyright anymore.Nevertheless, JSTOR stated that it was against its terms of use totake documents from their site and make them public.

 


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