Aaron Swartz would have turned 32 November 8th. He died five years and 10 months ago, and since then, like this weekend, the annual Aaron Swartz weekend takes place with all kinds of hackathons and events in his memory. At the time of his suicide Swartz was being prosecuted for downloading material in bulk from JSTOR, a scientific papers archive (even though he had legitimate access to it).
In 2014 the Smart New World exhibition took place in Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, which Elmine and I visited. Part of it was the installation “18.591 Articles Sold By JSTOR for $19 = $353.229” with those 18.591 articles printed out, showing what precisely is behind the paywall, and what Swartz was downloading. Articles, like those shown, from the 19th century, since long in the public domain, sold for $19 each. After Swartz’ death JSTOR started making a small percentage of their public domain content freely accessible, limited to a handful papers per month.
The Düsseldorf exhibit was impressive, as it showed the volumes of material, but the triviality of most material too. It’s a long tail of documents with extremely low demand, being treated equally as recent papers in high demand.
Scientific journal publishers are increasingly a burden on the scientific world, rent-seeking gatekeepers. Their original value added role, that of multiplication and distribution to increase access, has been completely eroded, if not actually fully reversed.
A full decade ago I heard a very interesting talk by an Elsevier employee who had thought long and hard about ways in which a scientific publisher can be relevant again, since their original function of multiplication and distribution has become completely obsolete. It was a very good talk diving into what a scientist needs from the start till the end of her career, and what type of services Elsevier could offer.
A year later that person didn’t work there anymore and in subsequent years in meetings with e.g. the European Commission all I heard from them was delaying tactics to please let them go on a bit longer without changing, before making open access publishing completely mandatory as well as free availability of any and all publicly funded research.
Since then the Elseviers of this world, and even ‘innovations’ like JSTOR, have betrayed their original purpose of multiplication and distribution exchanging it for an extortionist business model, that not only is a huge financial drag on many universities that have tax money to spend but also completely exclude all scientists around the world that cannot afford the rent-seeking practices of these publishers. They need to go.
Read Elsevier: “It’s illegal to Sci-Hub.” Also Elsevier: “We link to Sci-Hub all the time.” (Boing Boing)