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We are not asserting that any specific outcome is empirically superior to another just that given the facts of the case, it was not adjudicated fairy given what we know of similar cases.
And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.
So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.
Knowledge is power.
Mostly institutions that they’ve previously captured.
And yes: not sure how you missed it, but for like a decade or more people have been scanning in millions of papers and books.
Shortening path and timelines to info, innovation, further research.
That’s the end of the calculation.
The rest is just money-clutching noise.
Just link (or specifically mention) a few things they’ve done that people really appreciate.
No need to keep repeating the claim.
I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.
That’s where most of the PDFs come from.
We do not need any entity in between researchers and other researchers.
This may be different for others.
> [JSTOR is] a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access
You'd think that would pretty obviously include the vast swathes of material published before the internet and PDF preprints were a thing (and the considerable amount of subsequent research that just never got uploaded to anyone's website, for whatever reason).
Why does it need to be technically centralized and politically weak?
As to your 'why' question, we're talking about boring, thankless work that in many cases breaks the law. It's not exactly surprising that we don't see millions of people signing up to do it for free!
I don't understand your second paragraph.
Solution which does not require millions of people =]
and if I want to synthesize information from old ones, I’ll query a robot.
This is still research we’re talking about, right? Not a first-edition of famous literature?
>I’ll query a robot.
Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!
For certain sciences, 36 years is two lifetimes. Like I said: we’re talking past each other due to our research needs.
One can imagine the quality of research in fields where researchers can't be bothered to read anything that wasn't published in the last five minutes, and rely on other people's partial and possibly inaccurate summaries of key results. But that is another topic.
So does SciHub.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178697
Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place:
https://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-and-apex-covantage-mark-2...
If the JSTOR copy didn’t exist, the pre-print copy would be scraped from the author’s website,
or the text / results submitted by the author or someone close anonymously.
Less, more slowly, but the same point.
Many more recent articles also aren’t available on the authors’ websites, such as the one I linked.
Example 1: antibiotic and antiviral production technology for developing countries. Even if we limit ourselves to out-of-patent molecules, the primary literature describing the discovery, production, modification and testing of life-saving antibiotics was, at the time of Aaron Swartz, largely hidden behind strict paywalls that typically were accessed through a university library subscription. Access to all that information allows countries and institutions with very limited resources to set up generic medical production pipelines for life-saving medications they couldn’t afford to import - or to become international market competitors to established interests.
Again, that’s just restricting the argument to out-of-patent products that can be generically manufactured with no legal issues. What about life-saving but patented products that are too expensive for poor countries and regions to buy on the open market? Does that added-value IP charge justify unnecessary deaths in such cases?
And about that IP - the vast majority of paywalled research literature was produced with taxpayer funds delivered via government funding agencies, and there’s a very good legal argument that this alone puts it into the public domain. If private companies want to set up Bell Labs 2.0 with no government funding and patent everything they discover, that’s their own capex risk, but just hovering around and scooping up publicly funded discoveries via exclusive licensing deals with universities and researchers makes no sense - instead, patents should be available to any citizen of the government that put up the funds, and research papers should be available to anyone.
As far as the argument that widespread distribution of the knowledge to produce antibiotic, antiviral, and other complex biomolecular products represents a biological weapons risk? Notably that’s why no LLM provider service will help develop technical protocols for antibiotics production, or insulin, or anything similar - claimed dual-use risk fears. This conveniently slows the rise of legitimate independent competition in the pharmaceutical sector, which helps if the goal is maximizing profit margins via monopoly power. Bioweapons production realistically requires nation-state or large-corporation scale resources, and the solution is not obfuscation of basic knowledge but rather international treaties, select agent rules, laboratory operation and equipment purchase licensing requirements, etc.
That’s just one sector - there are at least a dozen other examples besides biomolecular drugs of ‘how it would help the world’ to make all published research literature available to anyone with a network connection, ask any LLM to enumerate them.