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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

How is this site planning to stay in existence for longer than about an hour after it costs some organization a significant amount of money? Does Blogger just ignore takedown requests?

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It isn't, but if you read down it's described as a stop-gap solution. If people are actually using it by the time it gets taken down then it will get resurrected elsewhere.

Here's my question: suppose I, as a kind-hearted university-based individual who respects the needs of the journals to make money but is also interested in making sure that the general public can read important scientific research, decide to upload some papers to this site. How can I be sure that it'll never be traced back to me?

Make sure documents you're uploading don't contain any of your personal metadata.

Ensure that you're not the only person who owns the copy you're uploading (it could be watermarked or be a unique revision of the document).

Upload via TOR or similar.

The second requirement seems like it will be especially difficult to fulfill, especially if the document in question is legitimately available only from a journal. Most users will not be able to reliably spot any and all kinds of watermarks or embedded invisible metadata.

You don't. Many journals' PDF-downloading systems embed metadata as well as visible watermarks containing your institution and often a timestamp and an IP address (of course, if your institution uses EZProxy, the IP address might not be immediately trackable back to you).

I am curious about your understanding of "the needs of the journals to make money". As I understand it, the purpose of an academic journal is to communicate new research. For about 300 years, a published print journal was about the most reasonable method of accomplishing this. Printing and shipping cost money, so a subscription model was a natural means of recuperating costs. Historically, academic journals were non-profit enterprises, and stipends were rare for the academic work involved, viz: writing, refereeing, editing, &c. Since a non-profit journal loses money on each print copy it has to produce, why shouldn't they reduce physical circulation by converting to an open-access model? The only people who stand to lose from a norm of open access are the for-profit publishing houses. Their influence on academic publishing, on the whole, has not exactly been encouraging so far.

If we can find a more efficient way to communicate research (perhaps some kind of global network of computers might do the trick?), then we should do that. We ought take no more consideration of the needs of the journals than we should for the needs of the buggy-whip makers.

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