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Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

sciencecitizen.org

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Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#3

Post by danso »

From the webcache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

>>>

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.

Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#5

Post by denzil_correa »

timtadh wrote: post #2

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).

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.

Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#9

Post by 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.

Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#10

Post by danso »

graue wrote: post #8

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

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.
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