12 ms·

Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

448 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

timtadh 14y ago
Has anybody upvoting this actually read the article? It is just a database error for me. (originally tried to read it at around 9 points).
- ck2 14y ago
  http://google.com/search?&q=cache:http://sciencecitizen.org/?p=219 http://google.com/search?&q=cache:http://sciencecitizen....
- denzil_correa 14y ago
  The article was just an elaborate summary on the title by @venturejessica It was working at the time I posted and even 2 minutes ago but I am getting a "Database Error" just like you. Here's another link which confirms the title of the article - - https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/290387879602032640 https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/290387879602032640. If appropriate, I can edit to change the link on the submission. Please advice, thanks.
  - trillionsflora 14y ago
    We are working to bring it back up. Give me another 30 mins or so. If not, we can link to the cache.
    - trillionsflora 14y ago
      Okay, reposted on my website at http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html. Thanks for being patient.
      - trillionsflora 14y ago
        Link should be back up. Thanks so much!
danso 14y ago
From the webcache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fsciencecitizen.org%2F%3Fp%3D219&oq=cache%3A&aqs=chrome.2.57j58j59l3j62.2860&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%... >>> Aaron was an activist, a champion, and a really smart guy who worked on things he really cared about. So much has been said about his life, his death, and his fight for research open access — and I’m glad to be part of this conversation. I’m very glad to have helped Eva Vivalt (@evavivalt) start the #pdftribute movement, to spread the word about putting academic papers online for #openaccess. Late last night, I noticed that Eva was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I tweeted to some people I know in Silicon Valley, and to some friends of Aaron’s, and then Anonymous picked it up — and we’ve now had millions of impressions and over 500 tweets per hour. This is something we can do for the memory of Aaron Swartz, and to lead the way toward more access to the scientific process for everyone. As Eva says: Where will this go? Well, maybe someone can scrape the pdfs together into a repository. Maybe #pdftribute can be a pledge to avoid paywalls in the future. Maybe we can push journals for more change. JSTOR’s gradual opening has been heartening, but there is still more to do.
jacquesm 14y ago
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pdftribute&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pdftribute&src=typd
trillionsflora 14y ago
Sorry for the site issues -- please do read the cache below. And support #pdftribute and #openaccess!
- trillionsflora 14y ago
  Here's a full reprint for those who have trouble accessing. Our tribute to Aaron Swartz – #pdftribute January 13, 2013 Aaron was an activist, a champion, and an incredibly smart guy who worked on things he really cared about. So much has been said about his life, his death, and his fight for research open access — and I’m glad to be part of this conversation. Late last night, I noticed that @evavivalt was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I tweeted to some people I know in Silicon Valley, and to some friends of Aaron’s, and then Anonymous picked it up — and it just caught on. We’ve now had over 3.5 million impressions and over 500 tweets per hour. This is something we can do for the memory of Aaron Swartz, and to lead the way toward more access to the scientific process for everyone. Now is the time to participate. If you’re in the UK, write to @ukhouseoflords using this link as they are accepting comment on these issues over the next couple of weeks. If you’re in the United States, perhaps you can help launch a similar inquiry at the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology by tweeting to @SciSpaceTechCmt. For hackers, perhaps you can take all of the #pdftribute files and put them on a central web page. Maybe other journals will follow (or exceed!) JSTOR’s lead and give more open access. Whatever happens, let’s all be a part of it. Please tweet your papers using #pdftribute! @venturejessica, writing for @scicitizen, www.sciencecitizen.org. P.S. It would be fitting if this got picked up on Reddit. Hint hint.
graue 14y ago
As seems typical for popular Twitter hashtags, it's mostly just people discussing the hashtag itself and relatively few links to papers.
- danso 14y ago
  I think until a system has been built up to manage this process, any postings will be more symbolic (as tribute) than of practical value. However, that's not to say that someone will see the need for something like this and build it. The inspiration has to start somewhere.
bendmorris 14y ago
It's a nice sentiment, but thanks to the Open Access movement, most recently published papers are already available online somewhere, and the people talking about #pdftribute are the people most likely to have already shared their papers. Important historical papers, even those that are now public domain, are still behind paywalls. As Aaron said, "even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost." [1] Sharing your own papers is nice, but it's also safe. It's not really challenging the status quo. [1] http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cefxMVAy http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cefxMVAy Edit: I overstated my point. I don't know that "most" papers are already available; it certainly varies a lot by field. I kind of doubt that many #pdftributers are people that weren't previously sharing their papers, though.
- return0 14y ago
  That is not true. I work in neuroscience and often find myself not having access to "just released" papers. Some of them may appear as preprints months later, if the author bothers to do so. I 've tried to email authors for copies a few times with no response. Even my institution doesn't provide access to all the journals we need (probably the situation is different in the US). There are actually underground websites for searching paywalled journals through proxies. TBH, historic papers are not that interesting anymore, since the most important ones are cited in more recent research. It's the cutting edge research where it's more annoying. What's more important though is that closed-access is depriving science of the ability to use automated tools for textual analysis. I hope this unfortunate event will motivate more people to realize that having unrestricted access to scientific results is an extremely important issue.
  - brittonsmith 14y ago
    I am in astronomy and it is common practice to post papers on arxiv.org. Because of the need for journal subscriptions and the time it takes for papers to be published, this has become the primary way we keep up with the field. I would say this has revolutionized math and the physical sciences. Perhaps one of the reasons for the difference between fields is that, at least in astronomy, our journals are supported by the professional societies, like the American Astronomical Society, and not run explicitly for profit. I should also add that in astronomy, the authors pay a significant amount of to the journal when a paper is published. It is usually in the range of about $100 per page.
anonymouz 14y ago
> Late last night, I noticed that Eva was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. That's good, but why didn't she offer them on her webpage before that? At least in the natural sciences, that is quite common now. The ArXiv is also a very popular option by now that is accepted by most journals. For a few months now, started by a blog post of Timothy Gowers, a large group of researchers has been pushing for reform too, and in particular has been pressuring Elsevier into making their content more accessible: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ .
trillionsflora 14y ago
Okay, I reposted the final post at my website, http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html. Thanks for your patience!
IgorPartola 14y ago
Honest question: why don't researchers normally do this? Those in the software development do this all the time: set up a tumblr/Wordpress/whatever blog and publish our findings. If I had a dime for every time I saw an article about some benchmark of tech X vs Y... If every research lab ran a blog-type setup where they published their findings (along with any other updates), the whole field could be revolutionized. The general public would have much more direct access to what the researchers are working on. We could even add the ability to donate to the researchers directly. This would hopefully foster collaboration as well. Instead of waiting for someone to come out with a paper to find out what they've been up to (unless you have a very close relationship with the particular researcher), you can just read their tweet/blog post/etc a la "tried sample X, results negative, but this is weird..." Combined with a research semantic markup (think OpenGraph but for scientific concepts), this could be linked into searchable databases. Peer review could be built in, maybe even via public key crypto: "this article is signed by 17 trusted researchers". This saves everyone money: no more having to subscribe to expensive research publications. You could have for-hire scientific editors built in as a service too. Every time you publish a paper you run it by an editor, but the editor now works for you; or you don't, and you just publish the paper and let the world decide if it is any good. The platform itself would probably have to be fairly extensive. We would want it to be distributed so that anyone can run their own system if they choose. We'd also want to have some more centralized hubs of this type, analogous to GitHub/Bitbucket. These might include easy access to for-hire editors, Tex/LaTex support, etc. There should also be a default license for the content. Perhaps an extension of Creative Commons but with specific provisions for the peculiarities of this field. My premise here is that while there is a whole lot of institutions that attempt to enable collaboration, they do often just get in the way. However, from what I've seen of researchers, they have the same mentality as the software developers: they want to share their findings with the largest possible audience and don't really care about much else. I think if it was easy to do this type of setup many would go along with it. What do others think? Edit: a nice side-effect of this could be that you don't have to be associated with an academic institution to publish. Currently, I could learn, say, all there is to know about quantum physics by reading all sorts of publications and material that is more or less freely available. I could then theoretically come up with something brand new, but couldn't get my voice heard since I am not a research professor at an institution. However, with this system graduates of the likes of the Khan Academy could have the same access to publishing and peer review.
mindslight 14y ago
Academics should already be doing this as a matter of course. If they'd like to actually show tribute to Aaron, they should: 1. Find seminal and survey papers from their fields that are unavailable on Google/Citeseer/etc, whose authors are dead/moved on/unfazed by the Internet/etc. 2. Download digital versions of these papers through their institutional access, or scan in paper copies if necessary. 3. Post them on their personal website with appropriate titling (especially important for papers that have been through scanning) such that they will show up in search engines.
- mjn 14y ago
  I've been doing this on and off, and encouraging some colleagues to do so as well. You can't mass-upload a ton of articles without attracting unwanted attention, but you can throw up a few interesting articles in unsecured directories. People do it accidentally all the time (Google Scholar finds lots of stuff from course wikis and accidentally open directory listings and such), so you could do it "accidentally" as well. It's also a minor way to have some influence on what gets read and cited. A lot of academics have a favorite classic paper they feel is unjustly underappreciated in their field. Why not put it online? Getting the paper into Citeseer and Google Scholar, where someone might stumble across it, is a small way to help promote underappreciated work. An underappreciated paper nobody can find is going to stay underappreciated!
munin 14y ago
You know what would (probably) really be a tribute to Aaron Swartz? Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc. Make a website that surveys which exit nodes are in these blessed networks and turns any URL for a paywall into a rendering using that exit node to access the paywall. Let professors, students, and staff stand with Aaron by running exit nodes that are configured to only connect to paywalls on their systems.
- kanzure 14y ago
  > Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is > blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc. I like this plan. But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Maybe we need moles in the publishing companies themselves.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    > But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Get more schools to do it. Get as many schools as possible to do it. How many schools would Elsevier be willing to cut off just to stop a few technically proficient users without university affiliations from accessing their stuff for free?
    - kanzure 14y ago
      https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front
- kpierre 14y ago
  websites like this already exist.
icelancer 14y ago
I was on the fence on publishing my work in a peer-reviewed journal or doing it online (I work in sports science). Aaron's death has firmly moved me to the free information camp.
jostmey 14y ago
I think it is time for someone create an online repository where people can upload their scientific/research papers. Many top-scientist will continue to publish their manuscripts in closed-access journals to maintain their academic status. However, I also believe many of these same men & women would also quietly upload their papers to publicly available repositories.
- taejo 14y ago
  This is the arXiv (arxiv.org). Science only, though.

448 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

Has anybody upvoting this actually read the article? It is just a database error for me. (originally tried to read it at around 9 points).

ck2 14y ago
http://google.com/search?&q=cache:http://sciencecitizen.org/?p=219 http://google.com/search?&q=cache:http://sciencecitizen....
denzil_correa 14y ago
The article was just an elaborate summary on the title by @venturejessica It was working at the time I posted and even 2 minutes ago but I am getting a "Database Error" just like you. Here's another link which confirms the title of the article - - https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/290387879602032640 https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/290387879602032640. If appropriate, I can edit to change the link on the submission. Please advice, thanks.
- trillionsflora 14y ago
  We are working to bring it back up. Give me another 30 mins or so. If not, we can link to the cache.
  - trillionsflora 14y ago
    Okay, reposted on my website at http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html. Thanks for being patient.
    - trillionsflora 14y ago
      Link should be back up. Thanks so much!

danso 14y ago

From the webcache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fsciencecitizen.org%2F%3Fp%3D219&oq=cache%3A&aqs=chrome.2.57j58j59l3j62.2860&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%... >>> Aaron was an activist, a champion, and a really smart guy who worked on things he really cared about. So much has been said about his life, his death, and his fight for research open access — and I’m glad to be part of this conversation. I’m very glad to have helped Eva Vivalt (@evavivalt) start the #pdftribute movement, to spread the word about putting academic papers online for #openaccess. Late last night, I noticed that Eva was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I tweeted to some people I know in Silicon Valley, and to some friends of Aaron’s, and then Anonymous picked it up — and we’ve now had millions of impressions and over 500 tweets per hour. This is something we can do for the memory of Aaron Swartz, and to lead the way toward more access to the scientific process for everyone. As Eva says: Where will this go? Well, maybe someone can scrape the pdfs together into a repository. Maybe #pdftribute can be a pledge to avoid paywalls in the future. Maybe we can push journals for more change. JSTOR’s gradual opening has been heartening, but there is still more to do.

jacquesm 14y ago

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pdftribute&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pdftribute&src=typd

trillionsflora 14y ago

Sorry for the site issues -- please do read the cache below. And support #pdftribute and #openaccess!

trillionsflora 14y ago
Here's a full reprint for those who have trouble accessing. Our tribute to Aaron Swartz – #pdftribute January 13, 2013 Aaron was an activist, a champion, and an incredibly smart guy who worked on things he really cared about. So much has been said about his life, his death, and his fight for research open access — and I’m glad to be part of this conversation. Late last night, I noticed that @evavivalt was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I tweeted to some people I know in Silicon Valley, and to some friends of Aaron’s, and then Anonymous picked it up — and it just caught on. We’ve now had over 3.5 million impressions and over 500 tweets per hour. This is something we can do for the memory of Aaron Swartz, and to lead the way toward more access to the scientific process for everyone. Now is the time to participate. If you’re in the UK, write to @ukhouseoflords using this link as they are accepting comment on these issues over the next couple of weeks. If you’re in the United States, perhaps you can help launch a similar inquiry at the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology by tweeting to @SciSpaceTechCmt. For hackers, perhaps you can take all of the #pdftribute files and put them on a central web page. Maybe other journals will follow (or exceed!) JSTOR’s lead and give more open access. Whatever happens, let’s all be a part of it. Please tweet your papers using #pdftribute! @venturejessica, writing for @scicitizen, www.sciencecitizen.org. P.S. It would be fitting if this got picked up on Reddit. Hint hint.

graue 14y ago

As seems typical for popular Twitter hashtags, it's mostly just people discussing the hashtag itself and relatively few links to papers.

danso 14y ago
I think until a system has been built up to manage this process, any postings will be more symbolic (as tribute) than of practical value. However, that's not to say that someone will see the need for something like this and build it. The inspiration has to start somewhere.

bendmorris 14y ago

It's a nice sentiment, but thanks to the Open Access movement, most recently published papers are already available online somewhere, and the people talking about #pdftribute are the people most likely to have already shared their papers. Important historical papers, even those that are now public domain, are still behind paywalls. As Aaron said, "even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost." [1] Sharing your own papers is nice, but it's also safe. It's not really challenging the status quo. [1] http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cefxMVAy http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cefxMVAy Edit: I overstated my point. I don't know that "most" papers are already available; it certainly varies a lot by field. I kind of doubt that many #pdftributers are people that weren't previously sharing their papers, though.

return0 14y ago
That is not true. I work in neuroscience and often find myself not having access to "just released" papers. Some of them may appear as preprints months later, if the author bothers to do so. I 've tried to email authors for copies a few times with no response. Even my institution doesn't provide access to all the journals we need (probably the situation is different in the US). There are actually underground websites for searching paywalled journals through proxies. TBH, historic papers are not that interesting anymore, since the most important ones are cited in more recent research. It's the cutting edge research where it's more annoying. What's more important though is that closed-access is depriving science of the ability to use automated tools for textual analysis. I hope this unfortunate event will motivate more people to realize that having unrestricted access to scientific results is an extremely important issue.
- brittonsmith 14y ago
  I am in astronomy and it is common practice to post papers on arxiv.org. Because of the need for journal subscriptions and the time it takes for papers to be published, this has become the primary way we keep up with the field. I would say this has revolutionized math and the physical sciences. Perhaps one of the reasons for the difference between fields is that, at least in astronomy, our journals are supported by the professional societies, like the American Astronomical Society, and not run explicitly for profit. I should also add that in astronomy, the authors pay a significant amount of to the journal when a paper is published. It is usually in the range of about $100 per page.

anonymouz 14y ago

> Late last night, I noticed that Eva was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. That's good, but why didn't she offer them on her webpage before that? At least in the natural sciences, that is quite common now. The ArXiv is also a very popular option by now that is accepted by most journals. For a few months now, started by a blog post of Timothy Gowers, a large group of researchers has been pushing for reform too, and in particular has been pressuring Elsevier into making their content more accessible: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ .

trillionsflora 14y ago

Okay, I reposted the final post at my website, http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html. Thanks for your patience!

IgorPartola 14y ago

Honest question: why don't researchers normally do this? Those in the software development do this all the time: set up a tumblr/Wordpress/whatever blog and publish our findings. If I had a dime for every time I saw an article about some benchmark of tech X vs Y... If every research lab ran a blog-type setup where they published their findings (along with any other updates), the whole field could be revolutionized. The general public would have much more direct access to what the researchers are working on. We could even add the ability to donate to the researchers directly. This would hopefully foster collaboration as well. Instead of waiting for someone to come out with a paper to find out what they've been up to (unless you have a very close relationship with the particular researcher), you can just read their tweet/blog post/etc a la "tried sample X, results negative, but this is weird..." Combined with a research semantic markup (think OpenGraph but for scientific concepts), this could be linked into searchable databases. Peer review could be built in, maybe even via public key crypto: "this article is signed by 17 trusted researchers". This saves everyone money: no more having to subscribe to expensive research publications. You could have for-hire scientific editors built in as a service too. Every time you publish a paper you run it by an editor, but the editor now works for you; or you don't, and you just publish the paper and let the world decide if it is any good. The platform itself would probably have to be fairly extensive. We would want it to be distributed so that anyone can run their own system if they choose. We'd also want to have some more centralized hubs of this type, analogous to GitHub/Bitbucket. These might include easy access to for-hire editors, Tex/LaTex support, etc. There should also be a default license for the content. Perhaps an extension of Creative Commons but with specific provisions for the peculiarities of this field. My premise here is that while there is a whole lot of institutions that attempt to enable collaboration, they do often just get in the way. However, from what I've seen of researchers, they have the same mentality as the software developers: they want to share their findings with the largest possible audience and don't really care about much else. I think if it was easy to do this type of setup many would go along with it. What do others think? Edit: a nice side-effect of this could be that you don't have to be associated with an academic institution to publish. Currently, I could learn, say, all there is to know about quantum physics by reading all sorts of publications and material that is more or less freely available. I could then theoretically come up with something brand new, but couldn't get my voice heard since I am not a research professor at an institution. However, with this system graduates of the likes of the Khan Academy could have the same access to publishing and peer review.

mindslight 14y ago

Academics should already be doing this as a matter of course. If they'd like to actually show tribute to Aaron, they should: 1. Find seminal and survey papers from their fields that are unavailable on Google/Citeseer/etc, whose authors are dead/moved on/unfazed by the Internet/etc. 2. Download digital versions of these papers through their institutional access, or scan in paper copies if necessary. 3. Post them on their personal website with appropriate titling (especially important for papers that have been through scanning) such that they will show up in search engines.

mjn 14y ago
I've been doing this on and off, and encouraging some colleagues to do so as well. You can't mass-upload a ton of articles without attracting unwanted attention, but you can throw up a few interesting articles in unsecured directories. People do it accidentally all the time (Google Scholar finds lots of stuff from course wikis and accidentally open directory listings and such), so you could do it "accidentally" as well. It's also a minor way to have some influence on what gets read and cited. A lot of academics have a favorite classic paper they feel is unjustly underappreciated in their field. Why not put it online? Getting the paper into Citeseer and Google Scholar, where someone might stumble across it, is a small way to help promote underappreciated work. An underappreciated paper nobody can find is going to stay underappreciated!

munin 14y ago

You know what would (probably) really be a tribute to Aaron Swartz? Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc. Make a website that surveys which exit nodes are in these blessed networks and turns any URL for a paywall into a rendering using that exit node to access the paywall. Let professors, students, and staff stand with Aaron by running exit nodes that are configured to only connect to paywalls on their systems.

kanzure 14y ago
> Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is > blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc. I like this plan. But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Maybe we need moles in the publishing companies themselves.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  > But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Get more schools to do it. Get as many schools as possible to do it. How many schools would Elsevier be willing to cut off just to stop a few technically proficient users without university affiliations from accessing their stuff for free?
  - kanzure 14y ago
    https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front
kpierre 14y ago
websites like this already exist.

icelancer 14y ago

I was on the fence on publishing my work in a peer-reviewed journal or doing it online (I work in sports science). Aaron's death has firmly moved me to the free information camp.

jostmey 14y ago

I think it is time for someone create an online repository where people can upload their scientific/research papers. Many top-scientist will continue to publish their manuscripts in closed-access journals to maintain their academic status. However, I also believe many of these same men & women would also quietly upload their papers to publicly available repositories.

taejo 14y ago
This is the arXiv (arxiv.org). Science only, though.