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[lordnincompoop]

In the aftermath of Swartz' arrest due to the unlawful downloading of scientific articles, a man named Gregory Maxwell has published almost twenty thousand scientific papers and journals on the now-infamous file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay (Link to download and Maxwell's own statements in the Ars article).

I originally intended to submit this to the Happy thread, but decided against it after seeing the post grow in size. instead, it has now become a discussion thread for both this predicament and possibly for IP and freedom-of-information in general. Feel free to read through and comment.

Background:
Scientists need their work published and read too. Various journals, galleries and museums facilitate this need, and hold often massive repositories full of all sorts of scientific literature (though publishers specialise in one field more often than not).

What is interesting about this system, however, is the fact that the authors will also have to pay a quite non-trivial fee to get it published. These companies empty the already rather thin wallets of both academic readers and authors; a successful article will leave the scientist just as poor as before.

And with the highly unfortunate “publish or perish” mentality about the whole field, the scholars themselves have an impossibly weak bargaining position: They’re expected to pump out (and publish at their own cost) papers at a steady pace; high positions of professorship and so forth often come with a requirement to have published several well-known academic papers; these papers are often essential for their continued good reputation – and for their findings to reach a sufficiently large audience. With the quite niche area (in large part due to the fact that access is so prohibitively expensive) resulting in few good options, and the academicians’ need to be published by prestigious journals, these businesses can simply tell them to “bend over like a big boy take it in the a**”. Open publishing efforts have and are being advanced, yes, but these remain small and relatively ineffectual. The “big names” persist.

With average costs placed around 20-30 USD for one person’s one-month access to one paper (my mother’s own essay, as an example, costs 35 USD for one person to access just once), scientific literature is typically ranked as one of the most expensive types available today. In the past, this was to offset costs of mechanical publishing for relatively niche markets, but with the ubiquity of digital publishing today – and the wholly digital form of the papers leaked – this higher cost has become largely unnecessary.

What’s more, these prohibitive costs keep the buying market – and the availability of said information – very small, covering not much more than the academics who need it for their livelihood. This leaves the general public bereft of high-quality literature such as this, even when by all rights it should be available to them: Thousands of old essays with expired copyrights are still peddled by these vendors, and are often the only reliable source for it. Restrictive copyright laws in some countries limit the access further.


Skipping ahead to the hereNnow:
All the articles published date back before 1927, which places them firmly in the area of Public Domain. And since the material in question was obtained through wholly legitimate means (contacts in academia are a very useful thing to have) this man's efforts should most likely be legitimate, and the papers should be free.

The journal-publishing businesses have continued to charge for said PD-papers, however, and with the staggering prices (Maxwell's payload totals at about 353248 USD for one person's computer's single-month access, and the amount of downloads going on right now would already put the "losses" at an insane 179096736 USD assuming the downloaders will only use the articles themselves if at all) at which the articles were placed, this leak comes as quite a relief. It's a signal that these businesses are going to have a tougher time controlling their information - bad for them, but good for the public in general as they gain access something that is, in my opinion, rightfully theirs.

I personally think that this will lead to good things; further dissemination of such information by audiences that were hitherto unable to do so (because of financial or political reasons) and progress toward my personal ideals of a liberal, digital utopia. 

*   *   *

For those too lazy to browse the links, I've included Gregory Maxwell's own musings about the topic and his actions below:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

  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
gmaxwell@gmail.com  Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAk4nlfwACgkQrIWTYrBBO/pK4QCfV/voN6IdZRU36Vy3xAedUMfz
rJcAoNF4/QTdxYscvF2nklJdMzXFDwtF
=YlVR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Aklyon]

Is that the same guy who was charged with 'hacking' just because he reads too much academia?

[Tilla]

Is that the same guy who was charged with 'hacking' just because he reads too much academia?

Yah, specifically because he downloaded articles he was already legally entitled to read.

[Nadaka]

No, he is doing it in response to the other guys arrest.

This isn't billions of dollars of damage done to the scientific publishing industry. Since the works are old enough to be public domain, it is billions of dollars of damage done to the public BY the scientific publishing industry that are being corrected.

[lordnincompoop]

No, he is doing it in response to the other guys arrest.

This isn't billions of dollars of damage done to the scientific publishing industry. Since the works are old enough to be public domain, it is billions of dollars of damage done to the public BY the scientific publishing industry that are being corrected.

Correct. However, a catchy title is a catchy title.

It's a nice change of pace from what is normally done, and I just hope that this just keeps going. Literature like this deserves to be read by all who wish to.

[Grimshot]

 I support this, also, I just started downloading the torrent .

[ChairmanPoo]

.... nice but its not like articles from before 1927 will have loads of stuff relevant to today's concerns. You might find it more interesting to google "open access journals"  or check the freebies that ppv journals do offer. Normally they give some free articles every month. Finally, if you find an article you want to read but is not for free anywhere, you could mail the author and ask him or her for a copy

[Eagleon]

It depends on the field. Anthropologists, etc., would drool. And a lot of the times as I understand it the journals acquire some pretty exclusive rights, though that might be changing.

You know if they just lowered the subscription prices I might actually be interested in getting some of these bastards. The one I was looking at was actually closer to $80 a month for a yearly subscription. I'm sure there are a lot more cross-discipline or otherwise just tangentially interested scientists/engineers now that would also be interested. It doesn't make sense to keep the same relative prices from 50 years ago when you've had 50 years of audience growth. It's not even good business sense.

[Grimshot]

.... nice but its not like articles from before 1927 will have loads of stuff relevant to today's concerns. You might find it more interesting to google "open access journals"  or check the freebies that ppv journals do offer. Normally they give some free articles every month. Finally, if you find an article you want to read but is not for free anywhere, you could mail the author and ask him or her for a copy

 That may be true but I would still like read them anyways just out of curiosity. Thanks for the tip though, I'll have to try that.

 Heh, its going to take me about 24 hours to download all of this. I hope my ISP doesn't cut me off for downloading to much lol.

[Servant Corps]

.... nice but its not like articles from before 1927 will have loads of stuff relevant to today's concerns. You might find it more interesting to google "open access journals"  or check the freebies that ppv journals do offer. Normally they give some free articles every month. Finally, if you find an article you want to read but is not for free anywhere, you could mail the author and ask him or her for a copy

If you go to a university computer that has subscription access to JSTOR or EBSCO or another database that stores tons of peer reviewed articles, you can get a couple of articles...but that doesn't really count as it being "free", as someone is still paying for said articles (the school, not you). Worst case, you can always read peer-reviewed journals at the university libraries (I don't think they allow you to check them out, but you could just copy them).

[mainiac]

And if you copy something at the university library, the copy machine is probably going to be overpriced too.  You just can't win.

[Il Palazzo]

Oh come on, mainiac, why so smug? If there is any information in whose free flow we should place value, it's academic information. If nothing else, the internet conversations would greatly improve their factual foundations with all the scientific publications available freely and just one click away.

"Exploiting the labours of unpaid scientists" does sound like taken from some weird communist manifesto or dystopian sf novel though.

[Aqizzar]

In my experience, I think most of the money that academic publishers make now is from universities buying student-wide subscriptions.  At least any American university worth its salt will have unlimited access to dozens of scientific journal storehouses (JSTOR especially, useless as they are), the cost of which is spread out into tuition prices.  But even so, once you find how much the stuff costs to people not enrolled in college, it becomes clear that any ordinary person trying to have access to the same information would have to spend thousands of dollars a year.

The OP spelled it out pretty well.  It's impossible to survive as faculty in modern academia without publishing early and often, which is balanced just at the razor edge of possible with a faculty salary; only people who have serious money to burn, whether out of pocket or in the ever more ridiculous prices of attending major colleges, can access the vast majority of the world's scientific knowledge; and a pretty small number of people are raking in money hand over fist with all-digital publishing, at the expense of scientific literacy.


The files in question all being as old as they are does work to Maxwell's credit, since a good number of them are going to be public domain (though bear in mind that public domain laws can still protect stuff that old, depending on circumstances), and because if publishers in question want to stick any lawsuit to him for anything more than the sticker price of his own download, they'll have a hard time proving a bunch of 85 year old scientific papers are actually worth anything.  Hopefully it'll prove an object lesson to the publishing industry before stuff worth serious money starts going the same route, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[penguinofhonor]

Wait, articles from 1927 aren't free yet?

I lose more faith in capitalism every day.

[Vector]

Hope none of that stuff is math, because once a math paper is published, that stuff should basically be considered free for universal consumption.  This is one of the reasons why mathematicians are terrible at citations, for example.

Hurm...