9 ms·
JSTOR torrent
- fatbird 14y agoPlease downvote this. A torrent of the JSTOR content shouldn't be Aaron Swartz's legacy. With JSTOR, Swartz was making a larger point; if all you have is these docs, you missed it.
- kqr2 14y agoThe torrent isn't his legacy but rather the spirit of his activism.
- seldo 14y agoEach download isn't a copy of some files, it's a statement that Aaron's cause was the right one, even if I disagreed with his methods.
- blablabla123 14y agoBut this is the point: he made something freely available that is supposed to be freely available. The individuals publishing do publish because they want their papers to be read and cited by others. Unfortunately there is hardly an established free peer reviewing system available, so most research results are only available to a small elite. Being no student anymore, I cannot afford reading most papers because $30 to read one paper is too much. (JSTOR seems to have more easy conditions, but when you google papers you sometimes get pointed to this site and sometimes to some other site...)
- mbesto 14y agoYou can't downvote on HN.
- arkx 14y agoYes you can. It just requires sufficient karma.
- daeken 14y agoYou can downvote comments, not submissions. You can only upvote and flag submissions.
- arkx 14y agoOh. Thanks, I didn't know this. Curious choice.
- rprasad 14y agoRecent change, after the downvote wars this past fall in which Microsoft articles would get unceremoniously downvoted to oblivion the instant they hit the front page. The idea is that articles should rise to the top on their own merits, but not be pushed to the bottom simply by people disagreeing with their content.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- anoncow 14y agoTo hell with this shit. I don't want what the copyright owners do not want to give. I don't want what they got by arm twisting authors. I don't want what they got for free but now want to make money off. They can die with this in their collective behinds. I will never submit anything to a closed journal, never ever.
- bendmorris 14y agoAre you an academic? You're right that their arms are being twisted. I can't have an academic career and not publish in closed journals. I hate it and I don't know what I can do about it. If I only publish in open access journals I'm just offering my career up as a meaningless sacrifice.
- micheljansen 14y agoNo longer an academic, but as a student I always appreciated it when authors put their own work on their own websites as a form of common man's dissent. I have done the same with my own meagre two publications, for which IEEE and ACM (or probably Elsevier and friends) charge up to $31 each. Ironically, due to the closed nature of their websites and the fact that the PDFs on my websites have since been indexed by various 3rd party research portals, they now far outrank the official (paywalled) versions on the ACM and IEEE websites.
- paulgb 14y agoSeriously, thanks for doing that. It's a wonderful feeling to search for the title of a paper and have the first result be a PDF link to an academic or personal site rather than a springerlink/JSTOR/citeseer result.
- tellarin 14y agoCiteseer is an open indexer, collecting files from the web and making them openly available. Many of those PDF links you mention are the sources for its index. It is nothing like Springer, Elsevier, ScienceDirect, Thompson, ... websites. Please don't lump them together. JSTOR sits somewhere in between.
- josh_fyi 14y agoWe wish it didn't have to be that way. We wish that information, particular academic publications, could be share openly and legally. Now, it's 1855. You want the slaves to be freed. By law. By right. So, do you shut down the Underground Railroad?
- NelsonMinar 14y agoThis archive is not directly related to Aaron Swartz's prosecution, it's something different. "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."
- _delirium 14y agoYes, as the file description says, this was released by Gregory Maxwell rather than Swartz, though it's tangentially related. Maxwell had assembled this collection of public-domain articles earlier, but hadn't decided whether to release it yet. After the Swartz/JSTOR case broke, he was spurred to release this torrent (the linked file description contains a statement from Maxwell explaining his motives). I don't think Swartz's famous JSTOR collection has surfaced.
- kanzure 14y agoNot quite, it's just the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It's a good start, I guess. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709 (lots of comments) > 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. Btw, the court documents from 2011-2012 show that aaronsw transferred his collection to an unidentified server in China. Maybe he has a deadman's switch? Or maybe it's time I go on a modern-day pirate treasure hunt.. yarr.
- jlgreco 14y agoI've been thinking that perhaps some sort of mass downloading could be organized, to be distributed among current college students with access to JSTOR. If it is thousands of students all doing a small part of the downloading, what could be done to stop it? The trick would be distributing the tasks, and collecting all the results. This is all assuming there is no dead-man's switch, but since he went out on his own terms I assume that would be triggered already.
- kanzure 14y ago> to be distributed among current college students I've been thinking about a mobile proxy app that students run on their phones, and a server that distributes tasks. The app would HTTP itself to the server and ask for a task, then HTTP the results back. Metadata (and the pdf url) would be extracted with zotero/translation-server, and a second request would be sent to phones to finally grab the actual file. Let me know if you're interested, contact deets in profile. proof of concept of the zotero/translation-server doing its job: https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot
- pronoiac 14y agoYou might look at the Archive Team for examples of distributed mirroring.
- 14y ago
- technifreak 14y agoI think we should pressure JSTOR to release the documents into the public domain. If it is in the best interest.
- ig1 14y agoJSTOR doesn't own the copyrights, they have the documents under licence from the journal publishers.
- nullc 14y agoJSTOR has happily allows publishers to restrict documents which are lawfully in the public domain and over which the publishers have no say except via the TOS they clipwrap you with when you try to access them. Excusing JSTOR is like saying "Hate the game, not the players". While JSTOR isn't doing everything in their power to fix this broken system I say: Hate the game _and_ the players.
- rprasad 14y agoJSTOR does not have the power to direct what others do. If the publisher chooses to restrict a document, JSTOR has no say in that decision--JSTOR is merely a repository. JSTOR has access to essentially every academic article in existence precisely because it does not attempt to enforce any political goal on contributors. If you want to change what publishers do with articles which should be in the public domain, get the law changed. But don't hold JSTOR responsible for something outside of their control.
- randy5007 14y agoSo is this safe to dl? Newbie here. I don't even know what these papers are.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoI finished downloading this last week.
- mserdarsanli 14y agoSo, do you want upvotes?
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoThat was the first thing on my mind.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Permit 14y agoPlease keep in mind that JSTOR paid almost $100,000 to digitize these files[1]. I think a lot of people don't realize that they're a non-profit organization with similar goals to many of you. I don't think it's such a bad idea to give them money to continue digitizing works that no one would have had access to otherwise. They provide full-text search of all of their documents and undoubtedly employ programmers and designers much like yourself. [1]http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/royal_society_frees_up_journal_1.html http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/royal_society_frees_up_...
- colechristensen 14y agoAnd if any educational institution used torrents instead of paying it would be unethical, but some day, and some day soon, restricting information will need to stop because it must. Armies of people would be perfectly willing to do the job of JSTOR pro bono publico only needing a bit of equipment easily enough donated.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 14y agoI am pleased to see this is the top comment. It is very frustrating to see people who completely disregard the cost and effort associated with digitizing and managing records.
- BuddhaSource 14y agoSo far 88 Seeds & 261 Leechers. I think its fair to donate some money to JSTOR. Even if its 1-10$ they can recover their losses & may be even profit for digitizing. If they can open a small donation channel I would like to donate & thank them. Make knowledge easily accessible to all & we should encourage it.
- niels_olson 14y agoI think it's fair to donate to JSTOR and seed that torrent. Production does not need to be tied to distribution.