
Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz - denzil_correa
http://sciencecitizen.org/?p=219
======
danso
From the webcache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](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)

>>>

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.

------
bendmorris
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>

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
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
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.

~~~
return0
Exactly. Arxiv is a revolutionary thing for math, physics, CS etc. Good luck
getting life scientists to put their precious papers there. Most don't even
pay the open access fee when the journal provides it.

------
anonymouz
> 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/> .

------
munin
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

        > 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
> _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
<https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front>

------
mindslight
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
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!

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

~~~
danso
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.

------
IgorPartola
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.

~~~
anonymouz
They do! Or at least they are starting to. At least in physics/math in my
experience most people have a personal homepage that they post their papers
to, and also upload them on ArXiv. There is some complication with regards to
copyright, because to publish in a journal you usually need to assign the
exclusive rights to them. Nowadays most journals have realized the need for
authors to post their papers on personal homepages and e-print services like
the ArXiv, so that this is no big deal in practice.

There are still problems: 1.) Usually old papers are not available via this
route. If you email the author and ask nicely he will usually send it to, but
at least in pure mathematics one quite common wants to look up really old
articles, say from the 1950s, and those are the ones that are terribly hard to
come by, because they are often only available behind a paywall like JSTOR.

2.) Currently "prestige" and peer review is handled through the journal
system: Authors send their papers to a journal for publication, other
scientists review them (for free), and then the paper gets published (or not).
Afterwards publishing houses, who add little value to the process, force
libraries to pay horrendous amounts of money to get access to these journals
(usually through selling bundles).

At the moment there are efforts underway to pleasure publishers into a saner
pricing structure, and there are now some open access journals where usually
the author pays once (if at all) and then it is free to read for everyone.

Many people also consider more radical approaches, for example, making
journals simply be ArXiv overlays that point to a set of papers on the ArXiv.
I have even heard suggestion of replacing peer review, at least partially, by
an open review system like you suggest, and some journals have experimented
with it, but it does not seem to have a lot of consensus behind it at the
moment. But this is in a way orthogonal to the problem of making research
available to as many people as possible.

The problem with the very radical change that you suggest, i.e., using blogs
instead of research papers, is that peer reviewed papers have proven their
worth over a long period of time. It is doubtful whether simple blog posts
would guarantee a similar quality over a long period of time. My personal
feeling is that there would be a lot of noise and incorrect stuff drowning out
the important stuff.

With regards to your edit: If you submit a paper that seems to be serious
research to a journal, it will be reviewed, and if it holds up, eventually
published. If the paper is decent, you'll be able get it published without
being associated to an academic institution (at least in mathematics, can't
speak for other fields).

~~~
IgorPartola
Thanks for the detailed response. Just one clarification: I am not suggesting
using just pure blog posts, but rather publishing properly formatted papers
using a self-hosted publishing system a la Wordpress. Blog posts may or may
not be added in order to promote the content.

It seems like the real issue here is prestige, which then translates to
funding. "Publish or die" is how most researchers seem to live. Thus I think
if we are able to show that self-publishing/distributed publishing brings the
money to the researcher and the academic institution then this idea would get
traction.

Re: edit. I see. That's great to know.

~~~
anonymouz
Ah, I see. I would still prefer the papers to also be hosted on a more
reliable system (for example, the ArXiV, or an electronic journals website),
simply because they become easier to discover this way and there is a certain
assurance that they will stay online.

I think that Terrence Tao <https://terrytao.wordpress.com/>) has an
interesting take on using blogs for math: He publishes in journals, but uses
his blog to post lecture notes as well as short summaries of some of his
papers.

But then this is not so different from a typical academics homepage: Usually
you will find a list of publications (hopefully with PDFs, at least for the
newer ones) and lecture notes there. But of course it differs for each author,
and perhaps other fields have different conventions.

~~~
IgorPartola
I think if the license was open enough a the paper could be hosted in multiple
locations. Once again, there is already a precedent for this: when you publish
anything on a blog you send a "ping" to Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to re-crawl
your site since you added new content. Your post ends up in the Google Cache,
Coral Cache, etc. I think a system that would proactively tell ArXiv "hey a
new paper is published!" or "hey a paper has been peer-reviewed and approved
by X via their GPG signature!" could solve the issue you are seeing.

> But of course it differs for each author, and perhaps other fields have
> different conventions.

I think this is also spot on. The research lab where I worked was a
collaboration between the Physics and Chemistry departments. The technology
used by the two chief researchers was radically different, despite having
worked together for decades. For example, my professor and his sub-group
(Physics) used LaTex to typeset all his papers. The Chemistry professor and
his sub-group, OTOH used Microsoft Word. From what I understood that was
pretty common for the respective fields. So much opportunity here as well as
so much resistance in just these types of issues...

~~~
DigitalJack
I like the gpg signature of peer reviewers part. It would both lend
credibility to the paper, and leave a trail of reviewers. It would lessen the
chance of a reviwer not taking their job seriously.

------
jostmey
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
This is the arXiv (arxiv.org). Science only, though.

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

------
jacquesm
[https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pdftribute&src=typd](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pdftribute&src=typd)

------
timtadh
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).

~~~
denzil_correa
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>. If appropriate,
I can edit to change the link on the submission.

Please advice, thanks.

~~~
trillionsflora
We are working to bring it back up. Give me another 30 mins or so. If not, we
can link to the cache.

~~~
trillionsflora
Okay, reposted on my website at <http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-
citizen.html>. Thanks for being patient.

~~~
trillionsflora
Link should be back up. Thanks so much!

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

~~~
trillionsflora
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.

------
icelancer
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.

