Ciao a tutti, per ricordarci chi siamo vi segnalo questi due articoli
che riguardano due attivisti che hanno lavorato alla liberazione di
articoli e letteratura scientifica: Alexandra Elbakyan e Aaron Swarts.
Alexandra credo sia ancora viva e in salute. Vi ho evidenziato anche
alcuni passaggi salienti.
CL
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http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science#articles-nav-dropdown-54
On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from
Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls,
illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever
published immediately to anyone who wants it. [...] This was the
experience of Elbakyan herself, who studied in Kazakhstan University and
just like other students in countries where journal subscriptions are
unaffordable for institutions, was forced to pirate research in order to
complete her studies. Elbakyan told me, “Prices are very high, and that
made it impossible to obtain papers by purchasing. You need to read many
papers for research, and when each paper costs about 30 dollars, that is
impossible.” [...] In her letter to Sweet, Elbakyan made a point that
will likely come as a shock to many outside the academic community:
Researchers and universities don’t earn a single penny from the fees
charged by publishers such as Elsevier for accepting their work, while
Elsevier has an annual income over a billion U.S. dollars. Elbakyan
explains: “I would also like to mention that Elsevier is not a creator
of these papers. All papers on their website are written by researchers,
and researchers do not receive money from what Elsevier collects. That
is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators
receive money from each copy sold. But the economics of research papers
is very different. Authors of these papers do not receive money. Why
would they send their work to Elsevier then? They feel pressured to do
this, because Elsevier is an owner of so-called "high-impact” journals.
If a researcher wants to be recognized, make a career — he or she needs
to have publications in such journals.”
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http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-robin-hood-of-science-the-missing-chapter
Aaron soon realised a grand injustice existed in the U.S. Access to vast
swathes of the core documents that make up the law are not freely
available to the public. To access the law, you had to pay a complex
bureaucratic website 10 cents per page. In fact, you still do, and it’s
a $10 billion-per-year business. Of course, the law itself is not
copyrighted. So when in 2008 Aaron wrote a piece of code to download 2.7
million documents from the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic
Records) database through a library terminal, and then made them freely
available, Aaron was not technically breaking the law, as the FBI
eventually conceded. Technologist Carl Malamud explains: “PACER is an
incredible abomination of government services;[...] These are public
records; U.S. district courts are very important — it’s where a lot of
our seminal litigation starts; civil rights cases, patent cases.
Journalists, students, citizens, and lawyers all need access to PACER
and it fights them every step of the way. People without means can’t see
the law ... it’s a poll tax on access to justice.” [...] At the end of
2010, Aaron plugged a laptop directly into the server farm at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He’d written a Python
script called “Keep Grabbing That Pie” to quietly download the entire
contents of the JSTOR database of academic research. [...] On the 6th of
January 2011, Aaron was arrested, allegedly assaulted by the police and
placed in solitary confinement. [...] The government gave Aaron a
non-negotiable demand that he accept the felony charges. Determined he
had not committed a crime, he refused to plead guilty in return for a
reduced sentence, and bans and restrictions on his computer use. [...]
On the 11th January 2013, two years of bitter legal proceedings later,
and only two days after the prosecution had declined his counteroffer to
a plea deal, he was found hanging dead in his apartment.
