10 ms·

MIT can honor Aaron Swartz by fighting to make journals open to everyone

• gcb 14y ago
  clearly universities gain from this current system. but I'm ignorant of how. why else mit would be the one pursuing punishment in this case when even the journal had given up? mit et all are clearly on the greedy ones side, not on the passive bystanders side. so, this is all very naive sugestions.
• drharris 14y ago
  They can further honor him by putting some reins on their legal team.
  • sp332 14y ago
    Well he did sneak into a closet and cause JSTOR to threaten to cut MIT's access. After things settled down, MIT dropped all charges. I think that was pretty reasonable.
    • waterlesscloud 14y ago
      Where have you seen that they dropped charges? Everything I've read has indicated exactly the opposite.
      • sp332 14y ago
        MIT dropped trespassing charges. (JSTOR also dropped their charges after Aaron deleted the files and promised not to do it again or something.) The feds got involved with the "hacking" because it crossed state lines, and the district attorney in Boston continued the criminal case after both JSTOR and MIT had settled with Aaron out of court.
        • btilly 14y ago
          And according to what the Aaron's lawyers have said, the prosecutors pursued the case because MIT behind the scenes wanted them to. MIT is not necessarily blameless here. I for one will be reading that report.
    • pekk 14y ago
      It wasn't JSTOR's fault, and it wasn't MIT's fault. Why, it can only be the government's fault!
      • sp332 14y ago
        It was a bit MIT's fault. It was a bit less JSTOR's fault. And it was a whole lot more the feds' fault.
        • aheilbut 14y ago
          And perhaps it was also a little bit Aaron Swartz's fault.
          • betterunix 14y ago
            He was not doing anything that other people who faced no criminal charges did not do. He just did things differently.
            • JasonFruit 14y ago
              There are a lot of people in prison who wish that was a defense.
    • jhuni 14y ago
      He was fighting against the commodification of academic journals. MIT should have given him a medal.
      • hect0r 14y ago
        Yes but did it occur to him that maybe the only reason such journals exist is because they are commercial enterprises?
        • sp332 14y ago
          You may not know this, but he founded Demand Progress. He was also the keynote speaker at Freedom to Connect 2012 in Washinton, D.C. So yeah, he probably thought about it a lot more than you have.
• czr80 14y ago
  "are giving their work away to journals for free" You know, the funny thing is that this pretty much describes the business model for all websites with user-generated content.
  • hect0r 14y ago
    It is also a fallacy that they are giving it away. They must be deriving some non-monetary value from doing it else they would not do it since they are free to decide not to publish or select a particular outlet. The fact is that authors are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in a journal.
    • betterunix 14y ago
      In theory, researchers publish their work in order to make their knowledge available to others. In theory, the more people who read a published paper, the better, regardless of whether or not the researcher who wrote it is even alive. In theory, the only reason researchers put their name, affiliation, and contact information on published papers is so that they can answer questions other people might have after reading the paper. It's a great theory... In practice, researchers publish their work because their jobs and livelihoods depend on it. In practice, researchers publish the same paper with minor tweaks in multiple journals because they need to pad their CV. In practice, most of humanity cannot read journal articles anyway so researchers are only really communicating with each other when they publish -- and they already know how to contact each other. So that is the value researchers derive from publishing their work: failure to publish means failure to advance one's career. It makes no difference what a researcher publishes, and so researchers tend to gravitate towards problems that do not seem very hard (but they make it sound very exciting in the titles and abstracts of their papers, because the people with hiring/firing power usually can't get through the introduction).
      • pseut 14y ago
        Whose theory are you describing in the first paragraph? Yours? In practice, the needs of society -- new freely available knowledge -- match up imperfectly with the needs of the people who can or should do the research: money, recognition by their peers, time to spend on fun problems, and general satisfaction (which can and almost always does come from a large degree from learning something new that other people will want to learn too).
• gm 14y ago
  I say screw the existing journals and encourage publishing academic work on new, free journals. There's nothing that says "existing journals must change or we have no other option"
  • thirdstation 14y ago
    The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the established, old-guard journals. It will take longer than just providing another avenue to publication. The incentives for publishing need to be addressed adequately. It's relatively easy nowadays to figure out how to produce articles for publication cheaply.
    • rotskoff 14y ago
      More than that, high quality academic journals provide a source of well-reviewed, thoroughly edited content. The arXiv, for example, is a great resource, but it can be overwhelming to have to filter through everything. As of yet, we don't have a freely available alternative to serious peer review in the 'prestigious' journals.
      • betterunix 14y ago
        "high quality academic journals provide a source of well-reviewed, thoroughly edited content" Review and editing is often done by volunteers, so this should not be a problem: we should encourage people to voluntarily review and edit journals that are freely accessible and shared. Assuming, of course, that the people who are in a position to do so actually care about making their work available for everyone to read, rather than just to the ivory tower.
      • mpyne 14y ago
        I'd be interested in how people propose to maintain expert review, editing, and vetting of ideas without having the users and beneficiaries of that research bear at least some of the cost. It's easy to make the taxpayers pay for everything but I'd feel better about it if the proponents of this were at least actually actively using the research in question. This still doesn't answer the question of how properly to prioritize the taxpayer funding involved. Fully funding every journal gives no incentive for efficient operation and would be incredibly wasteful. But if we decide not to fully funding all journals, who makes that decision? What criteria do they use? What specialized training should they have? Etc., etc.
• impendia 14y ago
  > Third, MIT should instruct its deans and other officials to no longer look favorably upon the mere fact of publication in a “prestigious” journal when making hiring and tenure decisions. Instead, promotions should be based on the quality of a person’s work, wherever it’s been published. (This sounds obvious, but most people in academia will tell you that where you publish is just as important as what you publish.) I wish I liked this article, but it seems that Manjoo has failed to appreciate why this problem is difficult, and therefore, why it has not been solved already.
  • pseut 14y ago
    Yeah, the casual suggestion that MIT should try to badly damage the careers of most of its faculty (presumably causing them to leave) suggests that he hasn't thought about this problem very long or talked about it with many people. As much as I dislike academic publishing, the last thing I want is to have deans and their staff evaluate the merits of research on a case by case basis. It sounds nice in theory, I guess, but they're people with agendas and biases too, and even setting that aside, they don't have the time or the training to do it. (as an, I hope, neutral example: could a dean trained as an economist really evaluate the relative merits of 15 different experimental physics papers? Could a trained physicist really evaluate the contributions of 15 different economics papers?) (note that this all applies to deans at other universities. The deans at my university are of course exceptional and above reproach). So, on the one hand, even MIT probably can't unilaterally make a lot of progress on this issue. On the other hand... almost every recent paper I've ever been interested in is available from the author's webpage (making this quote: "much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" ring hollow to me), all of the work to produce the journals is done for free or nearly free by researchers, and (anecdotally) everyone prefers electronic copies of the journal articles anyway. It seems like open access publication is almost inevitable. A more manageable (but less sexy) step might be for MIT and other universities to defray the admin costs for some of these flagship journals that want to go open-access. The article mentions the American Historical Review as having annual (editorial) costs of about $500k [1], which is tiny for a university. [1] From this post: http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on-scholarly-journal-publishing http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on-schola...
• snowwrestler 14y ago
  I'm not a fan of linking major cultural or ideological issues to specific tragedies in this way. If open access is a good idea on the merits, then the merits are where the battle will be won or lost. The article points out one reason to not provide open access: the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free. If there is not a good solution for that problem, the emotional appeal of "do it for Aaron" will not be enough to win--especially because the people who feel the greatest emotional attachment to Aaron are the people who already agreed with him. The rallying cry "do it for [person]" is usually only effective at rallying the troops who are already on your side, not convincing the other side.
  • tehwalrus 14y ago
    | the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free note, though, that scientists are not paid to edit journals nor peer-review articles in them; the publishers collect their cut simply for hosting the article on a website (and printing physical copies, but basically nobody uses them anymore.) If the publishers were more honest, and allowed people to download papers for the cost of the bandwidth plus a small contribution towards a sysadmin's salary, say 20 cents, and charged the full $10 wack for physical subscriptions/prints, we would have app-store economics and much, much less of a problem. Of course, people with a monopoly don't tend to reduce their prices voluntarily (apart from Amazon..) and full, free, open access (at least for publicly funded research) is a very reasonable demand.
    • pseut 14y ago
      This doesn't affect your argument at all, but academics are sometimes paid a small amount to edit journals; not enough though (AFAIK) to affect their decisionmaking.
  • illuminate 14y ago
    "merits are where the battle will be won or lost" We do not live in a society where merits are often where battles are won or lost, though. Certainly not in entrenched systems.
  • 14y ago
• hect0r 14y ago
  I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content since all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion. The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in such a journal and do so willingly and fully aware that someone else will make money from the work via selling subscriptions etc A better idea would be to invest the effort and money in building free alternatives based on alternative business models and working out how to incent authors to use them. This doesn't involve the breaking of any contracts or dishonouring agreements and is actually addressing the root cause rather than engaging in journal by journal skirmishes.
  • betterunix 14y ago
    "I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content" Well I guess that depends on what you base your morality on. I am of the view that it is inherently immoral to base a person's access to education on their wealth, because it ensures that wealthier people will have an easier time remaining wealthy and that poor people will have a harder time becoming wealthy. That applies equally to grade-school mathematics and reading texts as it does to academic journals. "all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion." Failure to publish means losing your job as a researcher; how is that not coercive? "The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in such a journal" Which is detrimental to the quality of research, and by extension harmful to society. By making publishing so prestigious, we have encouraged researchers to tackle only smaller, safer problems, to avoid questioning the validity of commonly used research techniques, and to waste resources by publishing minute variations on a single idea over and over again. Since copyright itself exists "to promote the progress of science," it would seem that correcting those problems would be of paramount importance -- and the prestige associated with publishing in a "big name" journal is one of the factors that created this situation.
    • hect0r 14y ago
      On your first point about access to education being based on wealth: education and knowledge are products just like any other and cost money to produce. Hence, it is perfectly moral to charge for access and indeed it is necessary to ensure that others invest the time and incur the opportunity cost of doing things that further human knowledge. If we make education and all knowledge free, how do you propose that the costs of producing this knowledge are offset? Taxes? Personally, I would rather that research and knowledge is entirely funded by private money and the private sector than by government fiat. With regards to your second point, failure to publish may mean losing your job but then that is because publish is part and parcel of your job. Failure to teach, turn up in the morning, wear decent clothes and a plethora of other things could likewise cost one their job but this still doesn't constitute coercion because the person is still free to work elsewhere. As for your last point, I fail to see why this is an issue. Publishing is prestigious because it is a proxy for the endorsement of ones peers and a form of validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a person's relative performance as a researcher. Maybe the issue isn't publishing per se but rather that journals are not exclusive enough and hence accept lower grade research. Maybe there is a market then for a journal to be even more selective -- and therefore even more prestigious than its competitors -- and by doing so incent a higher level of research.
• clicks 14y ago
  Well, some people are already on it, whether or not MIT chooses to do anything about it: http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/ http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/
• SagelyGuru 14y ago
  MIT is far more likely to come up with an exonerating report rather than an excoriating one.
• hakaaaaak 14y ago
  Not to be insensitive to Aaron, but even if this could be pulled off, which it wouldn't, this might encourage copycat suicides to produce change. Suicide should not be encouraged. Often change can happen without any harm to self or others. Sacrificing oneself because there is no other option is one thing; but suicide to make journals available was probably not Aaron's intent.
• slacka 14y ago
  I strongly believe that publicly funded research should freely available to the general public. I use the http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/ http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/ daily to help continue Aaron's fight. Could someone please explain what is stopping arXiv from filling the role discussed in this article?