
JSTOR torrent - gasull
https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331
======
Permit
Please 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_...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/royal_society_frees_up_journal_1.html)

~~~
joelthelion
The non-profit status doesn't automagically make an organization "good". The
executives of the institution still get paid and have an interest in
perpetuating and growing the organization, even if it goes against public
interest

I don't know much about JSTOR, but I know the IEEE (for example) can be a good
bunch of sharks. In the past, they forced you to hand them your copyright for
the privilege of publishing your work in their journals, and proceeded to go
after you if you committed the cardinal sin of distributing your own papers
through your research website. They also put your work behind a 30$ paywall
without, of course, giving you a dime.

~~~
anoncow
Exactly, being a non profit only means that they distribute all their profit
amongst themselves as salaries or investments.

The data would be much better at the hands of an entity that keeps the data
accessible and gives the authors a right to reproduce their works elsewhere. A
startup which does this would be excellent.

~~~
Permit
You guys are vastly oversimplifying this whole thing. The only reason JSTOR
gets access to these documents in the first place is because of licensing
agreements with the publishers.

You can try and a start a company that gives it all away for free, but you're
not going to be given access to any documents or you'll be sued for releasing
the ones you don't have rights to.

This is not as simple as "Just throw that stuff up on a Torrent and we're good
to go".

~~~
joelthelion
>This is not as simple as "Just throw that stuff up on a Torrent and we're
good to go".

As a scientist, that would pretty much solve my access problems, and help me
do a better job.

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kanzure
Not 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> (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
I'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

        > 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>

------
NelsonMinar
This 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
Yes, 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.

------
anoncow
To 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
Are 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
No 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
Seriously, 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
Citeseer 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.

~~~
paulgb
You're right, I didn't mean to imply that they're all the same. It's just that
when a PDF is openly available, it's often one of the first results, so seeing
citeseer is a bad sign. I seem to remember them creating pages for citations
they didn't have a download link for but now I can't find any examples so I
may be misremembering.

------
josh_fyi
We 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?

~~~
rprasad
Underground Railroad: people risking their lives to help slaves fleeing
slavery, rape, beatings, murder, and the wholesale destruction of their
families.

Aaron Swartz: releasing academic articles that are already available for free
or a low cost simply by visiting your local university and acquiring a guest
access card.

Not even remotely comparable.

~~~
Permit
Especially considering JSTOR is a non-profit that has to employ many people
with similar occupations to those of HN. They digitize documents that wouldn't
have otherwise been available at all before.

It's incredible how if they hadn't digitized the works, no one would be
outraged. But when they ask for a fee to cover the costs of such things,
everyone paints them as villains who try and lock information away from the
masses.

~~~
derekp7
Isn't Google digitizing all printed works they can get their hands on?

~~~
Permit
Many of Google's digital works aren't freely available, so I'm not sure where
you're going with this.

~~~
derekp7
The original argument was that JSTOR is doing the service of digitizing many
papers that are out of copyright, but otherwise not available in electronic
form. And if it wasn't for them charging access for this, then the work
wouldn't be done. I was pointing out that Google is doing the same thing, and
NOT charging for access where possible (i.e., the out-of-copyright works).

~~~
rprasad
Google has several billions in free cash lying around to do stuff like this,
and many billions more coming in from its various income sources.

JSTOR does not many billions in cash, nor any income sources other than access
fees.

Ergo, JSTOR must continue to charge an access fee so that it can continue to
perform its function of archiving articles and providing access to those
articles.

------
fatbird
Please 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.

~~~
mbesto
You can't downvote on HN.

~~~
arkx
Yes you can. It just requires sufficient karma.

~~~
daeken
You can downvote comments, not submissions. You can only upvote and flag
submissions.

~~~
arkx
Oh. Thanks, I didn't know this. Curious choice.

~~~
rprasad
Recent 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.

~~~
manojlds
But there is still the floagging. I have noticed some pro MS articles still
disappearing suddenly, due to the flagging I presume.

------
technifreak
I think we should pressure JSTOR to release the documents into the public
domain. If it is in the best interest.

~~~
ig1
JSTOR doesn't own the copyrights, they have the documents under licence from
the journal publishers.

~~~
nullc
JSTOR 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
JSTOR 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.

~~~
nullc
The law already is what it needs to be. JSTOR has limited access— and
continues to do so through their terms of services— access to even old
documents which are already lawfully in the public domain.

~~~
Permit
They have operating costs. They're a non-profit but they pay people to
digitize the works. It costs a lot of money to access some of these things.
It's not prohibitively expensive to access these documents. You can read three
articles free every two weeks if you're exceedingly down on your luck.

~~~
nullc
You couldn't a week ago. This isn't some accident. Their openness comes hard
won with threats of their reputation.

Their digitization is largely done by a for-profit company. It's not
competitively bid. There are many parties who would digitize these works at no
cost— archive.org and google for example, and could afford to do it without
pay walling the results.

~~~
Permit
>Their digitization is largely done by a for-profit company.

I was unaware of this. What company does the digitization for them?

------
randy5007
So is this safe to dl? Newbie here. I don't even know what these papers are.

------
IheartApplesDix
I finished downloading this last week.

~~~
mserdarsanli
So, do you want upvotes?

~~~
IheartApplesDix
That was the first thing on my mind.

