[okfn-discuss] Fwd: <nettime> Aaron Swartz charged for downloading too many Journal articles from the Library: Please sign suport petition.

Thu Jul 21 13:45:01 BST 2011

It seems a little early to be jumping to the conclusion that this is
either civil disobedience for its own sake, or an attempt to
redistribute non-open-access papers, given his publishing history:

"In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170
law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the
results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he
researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on
Institutional Corruption." (http://demandprogress.org/aaron)

ie. he has a history of published research on topics which actually need
this kind of volume of papers as raw data.

Graham

On 07/21/11 12:33, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> I have blogged my personal thoughts.
> 
> http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/07/20/the-ethics-of-%E2%80%9Cstealing%E2%80%9D-scientific-articles-and-civil-disobedience/
> 
> If (and I am not sure whether it is till we have more info - perhaps in
> the trial) this is an act of civil disobedience - there can be merit in
> it. If it is Guerilla OA (as I believe he earlier indulged in) then I
> think that is outside the OKF's remit and practice. The OKF is not a
> lobbying organization and should also not support deliberate law
> breaking at this time.
> 
> We are - as we are reminded at OKCon's and elsewhere - in the middle of
> a major battle for our future information world. What I think the OKF
> does best is to define where we want to be. There are certainly
> different ways of getting there. At present I think OKF benefits from
> having a community where a number of other players (government
> particularly, but also early Open adopters in the publishing community,
> such as BMC's adoption of the Panton Principles).
> 
> This does not mean that we cannot personally adopt a wide range of views
> about Swartz, but I don't think this maps onto OKF activities.
> 
> P.
> 
> -- 
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
> 
> 
> 
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