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Academic Torrents

academictorrents.com

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Re: Academic Torrents

#21

Post by jsumrall »

nvdk wrote: post #19

this seems to be very focused on US academics, at least that is what impression I'm given by labeling ".edu" addresses. It gives a feeling that these torrents/datasets are of better quality. I'm also missing a catalog on this tracker, some basic taxonomy would be most welcome...

I didn't get that impression. Are you referring to the ".edu" address of the creators of the site? Do you mean people with a ".edu" address, and therefore at an American institution, give you a sense of their work being higher quality?

Re: Academic Torrents

#23

Post by teddyh »

So what do I do if I want to seed them all? Also, are all the data sets (and other things) freely licensed, i.e. no “non-commercial use only” clauses or things of that nature? Can I count on this going forward?

Re: Academic Torrents

#27

Post by _delirium »

cing wrote: post #7

The team should learn from the ghost-town that is BioTorrents[1] and offer more than just a tracker. [1] http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php?incldead=1

That's one reason I'd prefer that academics just put data into some kind of local university archive, where possible. Many universities provide resources to host scientific data (and have done so for decades, since the days of ftp.dept.university.edu servers), and putting it there makes it more likely that it'll still be there in 10 years. Torrents by comparison tend to be: 1) slow, as you rely on random seeders rather than a university that's peered onto Internet2 or the LambdaRail; and 2) unreliably seeded, as people drop off. Plus the workflow of "curl -O URL" is nicer than torrenting.

Universities typically have great bandwidth and good peering, and already host much larger data repositories than this seems to be targeting (e.g. here's a 30-terabyte repository, http://gis.iu.edu/), so they should be able to provide space for your local scientific data. Complain if not!

Re: Academic Torrents

#28

Post by Schwolop »

henryzlo wrote: post #17
TheBiv wrote: post #10

This is really cool. I simply wished that the messaging was more clear and told a story that I could tell to my friends who ultimately are "too busy" to think about the value of this product. Unfortunately "We've designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets - for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds." Ju…

Thanks for the comment. We've created a shorter "pitch" style presentation for the non-technical / too-busy, which summarizes the benefits etc. in a short several minute description. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JC2d1g9U6HaenGSn_Xvk...

Respectfully - that's an EVEN LONGER message. You need a sentence. Ten words, tops.

Re: Academic Torrents

#30

Post by runarberg »

_delirium wrote: post #27
cing wrote: post #7

The team should learn from the ghost-town that is BioTorrents[1] and offer more than just a tracker. [1] http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php?incldead=1

That's one reason I'd prefer that academics just put data into some kind of local university archive, where possible. Many universities provide resources to host scientific data (and have done so for decades, since the days of ftp.dept.university.edu servers), and putting it there makes it more likely that it'll still be there in 10 years. Torrents by comparison tend to be: 1) slow, as you rely on random seeders rath…

Perhaps if universities would robustly seed their staffs and students torrents?
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