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In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

edward.io

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Re: In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

#11

Post by houshuang »

jcitme wrote: post #9
smogzer wrote: post #8

Cool effort. But ... its a score to jstor. It's unorganized. But ... science if full of noise and crappy publications these days anyway. Lots of ways to do the same thing, unprooven and only exists because everybody has to publish to stay relevant. Now: How to really improve science ? My suggestion: A big python framework for each field of study. That has implementations of the real algorithms and models for comparis…

It's not meant to be a competitor to JSTOR, as much as this is a statement in honor of someone. A framework like that would be awesome, but that has a different meaning from the collection of personal pdf posts/uploads each individual on Twitter contributed.

For someone who has been working on OA and scholarly publications for a few years, it's a bit tricky to enter these kinds of debates. On the one hand, I want to respect Aaron's legacy, and am very touched by the spontaneous and organized moves to honor him. On the other hand, I am very interested in these issues, and love discussing them, seeing how we can do things better.

For smogzer, there is some interesting research on how knowledge from the research literature can be better represented. For example using concept mapping, see this great paper by Simon Buckingham-Shum (who has many others): http://oro.open.ac.uk/6463/1/kmi-04-28.pdf. Anita de Waard has given many presentations on semantic and executable papers, for example http://www.slideshare.net/anitawaard/executing-the-research-....

Re: In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

#12

Post by houshuang »

An important thing to remember, is that many journals already permit self-archiving of publications (ie. uploading a pre-print to a personal server or an institutional repository). In fact, about 70% of large publishers automatically allow some form of self-archiving, and for the others, many have been successful including a copyright addendum with the copyright-transfer document, retaining some rights (http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/). FAQ on self-archiving (http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/).

At my university, we keep running workshops, there are student staff in the library willing to help upload articles to the repository if you just e-mail them, etc, but still, most academics won't take the five minutes to do this, even if they have the right.

This doesn't mean that the academic publishing system shouldn't change, it absolutely should. And there's also a lot of value in "liberating" academic publications that would otherwise not be free. But I hope people would become more aware of what is already possible, and legal!

Re: In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

#14

Post by streptomycin »

houshuang wrote: post #12

An important thing to remember, is that many journals already permit self-archiving of publications (ie. uploading a pre-print to a personal server or an institutional repository). In fact, about 70% of large publishers automatically allow some form of self-archiving, and for the others, many have been successful including a copyright addendum with the copyright-transfer document, retaining some rights ( http://schol…

Agreed, a lot of people don't know their current rights. One major reason is because that information is typically buried in some unintuitive legalese deep in some publisher's website. To work around that problem... this is a very useful database that will allow you to easily check what a journal/publisher allows you to do with your publications: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Most in my field at least allow you to put postprints (the final version of the paper, but not formatted by the journal's typesetters) online, although there are a few stragglers who don't let you do anything.

Re: In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

#15

Post by Vivtek »

houshuang wrote: post #10

As long as these PDFs are exposed publicly (and linked to, which a tweet with or without #pdftribute will take care of), they will mostly be indexed by Google Scholar, which does a decent job of extracting metadata using heuristics etc. Of course, it would be much better if people started embedding machine-readable metadata in PDFs (totally possible, see for example http://code.google.com/p/pdfmeat/ ), and if there w…

Thanks for contributing to this thread - I've been looking for something like this for years!

Re: In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

#16

Post by zopticity »

It is a great loss to know such an entrepreneur has died because of legal problems. I, myself, have faced similar been in a similar situation. I feel that Aaron was a martyr for the open source of academic papers. Unfortunately he will not see his impact on this modern and technology dependent world.

R.I.P. Aaron Swartz!

Re: In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

#17

Post by edwardio »

smogzer wrote: post #8

Cool effort. But ... its a score to jstor. It's unorganized. But ... science if full of noise and crappy publications these days anyway. Lots of ways to do the same thing, unprooven and only exists because everybody has to publish to stay relevant. Now: How to really improve science ? My suggestion: A big python framework for each field of study. That has implementations of the real algorithms and models for comparis…

> But ... its a score to jstor. It's unorganized.

I'd imagine competing against an organization that's been around for 18 years won't take 6-7 hours of coding. :) It's an MVP, one I'm quite embarrassed about. But I'll continue coding. Someone suggested an open Google Scholar approach - that's one direction this project could head in.

Re: In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

#18

Post by houshuang »

Vivtek wrote: post #15
houshuang wrote: post #10

As long as these PDFs are exposed publicly (and linked to, which a tweet with or without #pdftribute will take care of), they will mostly be indexed by Google Scholar, which does a decent job of extracting metadata using heuristics etc. Of course, it would be much better if people started embedding machine-readable metadata in PDFs (totally possible, see for example http://code.google.com/p/pdfmeat/ ), and if there w…

Thanks for contributing to this thread - I've been looking for something like this for years!

Let me know if you want to discuss further - I've lot's of ideas, but not able to make most of it happen by myself. For example, here are a bunch of (unfinished) notes about an open alternative to Google Scholar, and open social API to share citations/notes, etc. http://reganmian.net/wiki/ideas_for_scrobblr
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