Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents. I have access to JSTOR also. What moral issue can you possibly raise with someone using their access to download these documents? It's OK to download 10, but not 1000000? Do you have a moral issue with automated downloads -- and if so, how can you justify JSTOR itself?
It is worth noting that JSTOR did not want to press charges in this case. After contacting Swartz, they were satisfied that he was not going to share the documents with others (and they "recovered" them, whatever that means), and that would have been that. The government decided to prosecute, probably to show how serious they are about restricting access to human knowledge (or whatever it is that they thought this prosecution would accomplish).
> Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents
The JSTOR site says "Libraries and organizations license full-text content for their patrons, and if you are affiliated with one of these institutions, you can access those complete articles."
Their site seems to say anyone with a uni affiliation.
Or anyone who is a patron of a university library system, which in this day and age means anyone who has been given access to a university network. Where I am, anyone can get one-week access if someone who is affiliated signs in and generates a unique token for the guest; we frequently do this when researchers from other schools or companies visit my group, but there is no actual restriction on who can be given access. Most universities have a system for allowing members of the public to access their library system, and by extension, JSTOR.
Really, it is not much different from walking into a university library and reading the books there. Most of the schools I see allow anyone to walk into their library, without having to prove they have any sort of affiliation.
It is as though universities believe their purpose is to spread knowledge or something crazy like that...
> Or anyone who is a patron of a university library system,
> which in this day and age means anyone who has been given
> access to a university network.
Not everyone is in a university, in fact there are billions of people who aren't in school and who would absolutely benefit from having access to the scientific knowledge contained in these tax-payer-funded documents. The current majority of people who read papers are, of course, going to be in colleges because they are the ones who have access in the first place.
I challenge you (in a very light-hearted, positive way) to demonstrate how to access papers as a member of the public. Most universities seem to require you to show up in person to use the library computers. You can subscribe to classes and get a student id to access literature, but then you no longer count as the public, do you?
Also, DeepDyve and ReadCube are scams. Anyone who reads a healthy amount gets charged out the wazoo. I didn't even know I had a wazoo!
"Not everyone is in a university, in fact there are billions of people who aren't in school and who would absolutely benefit from having access to the scientific knowledge contained in these tax-payer-funded documents"
Sure, but that was not my point; my point was that there was no moral issue with him downloading these documents, because he had every right to access them, just like anyone else whose computer is connected to a university's network. The underlying assumption of people who think he did something wrong is a combination of (a) that access is only supposed to be for reading the articles, not archiving them and (b) that there is something suspicious about writing a program that automatically downloads things (unless you are running an operation dedicated to archiving). The assumption is that anyone who thinks about these things differently must be some kind of criminal or public danger, and it is an assumption that has been fueled by years of propaganda from businesses whose profits depend on people not doing such things.
"I challenge you (in a very light-hearted, positive way) to demonstrate how to access papers as a member of the public"
Unfortunately, the only response I have is that the current system is designed to thwart that sort of thing. We live in an anachronistic age when it comes to accessing human knowledge. We continue to assume that we need academic publishing companies to spread that knowledge. We continue to assume that it makes sense for people to physically enter a major library to find the journal articles they are looking for.
A century ago, that did actually make sense. You needed industrial-scale printing equipment to make enough copies of academic publications to satisfy the world's needs. For the most part, only universities had the resources to pay the publishers for that work, and only universities had enough space to archive those publications. In this day and age, that is not even remotely true: a typical desktop computer has enough disk space to store more than many university library systems could store on their shelves. One only needs to walk through the bound journals section of a typical university library to see the reality of this century: the bound journals are just sitting there, collecting dust, because everyone is downloading the articles using a computer.
So in theory, the general public could have access to this knowledge, and to all future research, and they could even help in the dissemination of that knowledge. In practice, only the lucky few (like me!) who happen to be affiliated with a major university can access it without jumping through hoops or traveling great distances. The sickest part about it is this: I would be prosecuted if I dared use the desktop in my office to give other people access to that knowledge. Stated another way, if I were to use my own knowledge and affiliation with a university to spread knowledge to others, I would be a criminal.
Indeed. Public money should pay for the function of entities like JSTOR.
The public already paid 99% of the money for public research, yet only 1% of them have access to the fruits because those who paid 1% (for maintaining an archive) want it this way.
It's not a matter of restricting access to public knowledge; it's a matter of Aaron draining the village pool.
Information shares all of the downsides of the public commons: because it is freely available, no one wants to pay for the maintenance costs. JSTOR charges fees for access to cover the ongoing maintenance costs associated with storing access to thousands of journals and millions of articles published over several centuries. Note also that JSTOR provides assistance with locating articles relevant to the user's needs (i.e., library functions), and such services are frequently more valuable than its archival functions.
A wiki will not suffice to maintain access to this information; Wikipedia and Wikileaks have shown that. You would end up with all of the articles but no practical way to find the particular article or articles you are looking for.
"It's not a matter of restricting access to public knowledge; it's a matter of Aaron draining the village pool."
Copying documents does not destroy the original copies, so it does not drain anything.
"Information shares all of the downsides of the public commons: because it is freely available, no one wants to pay for the maintenance costs."
If JSTOR had made these documents freely available, there'd be plenty of people and organizations who'd gladly have paid for the maintenance costs. For example, archive.org.
"Note also that JSTOR provides assistance with locating articles relevant to the user's needs (i.e., library functions), and such services are frequently more valuable than its archival functions. ... A wiki will not suffice to maintain access to this information; Wikipedia and Wikileaks have shown that. You would end up with all of the articles but no practical way to find the particular article or articles you are looking for."
If anyone wanted to use those services, they could pay JSTOR for them regardless of whether these documents were also available elsewhere.
You can't have a tragedy of the commons when the commons belongs to one company. JSTOR isn't a village pool unless it's public, which it isn't.
JSTOR's charges aren't at all proportional to the hosting cost. If they were only charging for hosting then they should be happy if people share the data without using their servers, but they aren't, so it is manifest that they are charging for more than the hosting.
Indexing articles for browsing and search is not a real problem if the information is made public. If other people want to help JSTOR with this, they are not allowed to because JSTOR keeps all this publicly-funded information proprietary in perpetuity
So according to your argument, the risk is not that we will be unable to access such articles without JSTOR, but that we will be unable to search for articles? That's basically saying that a document search system is too costly to create or maintain for a university library to deal with, and so JSTOR is necessary for queries. Which sounds like an unfounded assumption to me, considering how widely deployed CiteSeerX is.
Even if your argument were true, what exactly was Aaron draining? If JSTOR is providing this valuable search service, wouldn't that alone fund their operation? If having millions of documents is useless because we have no way to search those documents, what difference does it make if Aaron really had been sharing the documents with others? Would it not have been a good thing if Aaron had amassed these articles and made them available using a better search service -- wouldn't we have benefited (and isn't that the whole point of copyright anyway?)?
Had Aaron been accused of hacking into JSTOR to download the source code of their search system, you might have a point. Instead, he was accused of copyright infringement and of violating a network use agreement (because he was trying to evade the ban of his laptop's IP address); at no point was JSTOR's valuable search service even an issue in this case.
Then Swartz was no threat. He was going to upload the articles to other people if he wanted to. He was going to have to provide the search tools.
I don't understand why they would "[secure] from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and [receive] confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed".
There are already places for open-access articles, mainly PLOS and arXiv. PLOS stands for Public Library Of Science and was create around 10 years ago. It has got quite popular among scientist, and it's peer reviewed. However, it charges the authors with a small fee, usually around $1000 per article. For some scientists this is a problem. Personally I think this is a much better and a more economic systemic model than subscriptions. The subscription model unfortunately is pretty nasty (http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=890), to the point that thousands of scientists, and among them some renown geniuses, have decided to boycott it (http://thecostofknowledge.com). And now, with the death of Aaron there is one more reason to make the research articles free to the tax-payers, who in fact already fund the researchers, but somehow have to pay extra to access their results.
Because most academic research is at least partly funded by taxpayers (even more so everywhere but in the US), and scientists pay submission fees (again, with taxpayer money) to cover what the journals consider their contribution to the process.
For some more information about the business practices of this industry, this is a nice, short text: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/academic-pu...
Man, it's just really too bad he took his own life. Man. That being said, I would advocate working through the legal system to effect change in this unjust area, not break it.
Do you know of anyone working through the legal system to effect such change?
Someone on Reddit explained this better than I can, but JSTOR is basically a scam. It pockets the money that it receives and doesn't pay anything back to the authors. As an author, you yourself have to pay for access to your own work (or your university does, via a subscription).
JSTOR has scholarly articles dating back centuries - when you consider that that information deserves to be free, and the societal cost of keeping that information and research hidden, JSTOR's mere existence is practically a crime.
CERN has been very clear in their opposition to JSTOR's practices, from what I know.
In the copyright wars, JSTOR is hardly a bad actor compared to the publishers. It's a nonprofit formed by libraries so that there would be a single entity to negotiate with publishers and digitize journals. I'm not saying they've always moved as quickly and aggressively as I'd like, but calling their existence "practically a crime" strikes me as very wrong. If they didn't exist, most libraries wouldn't have access to the journals JSTOR archives.
>If they didn't exist, most libraries wouldn't have access to the journals JSTOR archives.
This isn't true. Something else would be in its place. The only question is whether it would be better. I believe that society has already paid a number of times for the benefit of most of the knowledge in this archive. This should be freely available to anyone with access to the internet.
I don't know much about this system JSTOR, but you know with what you said about "scholarly articles dating back centuries" I'd expect them to have some costs associated with those efforts. Its not a popular way to raise money, yes, but who else are you going to charge other than the people interested in using that system...just saying.
"JSTOR is basically a scam. It pockets the money that it receives and doesn't pay anything back to the authors"
We are not talking about "authors" in the sense of some guy living in a townhouse, smoking a pipe and drinking scotch while writing a novel. We're talking about people who are paid to do scientific research, usually by the government, and who must publish their work in a journal or conference to continue continue or advance their careers.
Really, JSTOR is not even that bad; they are a search service. Look at the journals themselves if you want to talk about a scam: the authors are not paid by the journal publishers, the journal publishers do not fund grants any more than any other tax payer does, and it is often the case that the reviewers of the articles (peer review, the foundation of scientific publishing) are unpaid, and in some cases even the editors of the journal are volunteers. What do the journal publishers do? They print and bind journals, sometimes, or else they charge people (including JSTOR) for access to electronic copies of the articles. Journal publishers are an anachronism that is being kept alive by an out-of-control copyright system; JSTOR is just an outgrowth of the problem, like a little hair growing out of a cancer (and make no mistake, "cancer" is an apt description of journal publishers: they get in the way of scientific research and make it harder for scientists to make their findings available to humanity).
JSTOR is a non-profit created to store scholarly articles and maintain archives of scholarly work for future access. JSTOR is and was a driving force behind the digitalization of scholarly works and most academic journals. JSTOR's sole function is to maintain these archives, even if/when it is not commercially viable to do so.
All of this costs money. Universities and companies pay for JSTOR so that it can keep doing its job. More importantly, universities and companies pay for JSTOR so that they don't have to take on the burdens of maintaining complete archives of all academic works.
Except that the access fees paid by any single large university would be enough to completely fund an open digital archive.
Yes, the fees are paid to the publishers— who themselves do not pay the authors, reviewers, and even (sometimes) the editors of the journals. As part of the NYC non-profit high society Jstor is far from the most efficient non profit— but their fault is not their inefficient spending and high salaries. Their fault is facilitating a system which is amoral and harmful to society.
Absent Jstor the universities and libraries would have an easier time reforming the system because writing a single big check per quarter wouldn't remove most of their problems (while leaving everyone outside of those institutions without access).
Oh really? I thought universities and companies paid for JSTOR so that they could redistribute those academic works for profit. If not, why would they care if someone else gets access without paying? And if the universities and companies didn't care, why would JSTOR, a non-profit, care?
This is the sum total of human academic knowledge. It must be freed. The first tragic thing was that he failed to torrent it immediately. Now this. A great loss.
That depends on your philosophy about knowledge. If you believe that the ability to communicate our knowledge to each other and to future generations is our most important advantage, then anything that makes it easier to access knowledge is a good thing. If instead you believe that individuals should profit from their knowledge, Swartz is just as bad as JSTOR and our government is corrupt for not prosecuting the lot of them (most of the people whose articles were downloaded were probably paid nothing for their writing).
Or, maybe you believe that corporations are our saviors and therefore anything that goes against their interests is a bad thing. In which case the government is doing exactly what it should be doing.
All academic journals where the underlying research was paid for by the state should be available to any taxpayer without cost -- which for all practical purposes means any person without cost -- because they have already paid for them.
Paywalled journals are a form of rent-seeking which while arguably an acceptable evil in the days of print are an unacceptable evil today.
