Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz | Hacker News Reader

Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

sciencecitizen.org

448 pointsdenzil_correa52 comments

From the webcache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

>>>

Aaron was an activist, a champion, and a really smart guy who worked on things he really cared about. So much has been said about his life, his death, and his fight for research open access — and I’m glad to be part of this conversation. I’m very glad to have helped Eva Vivalt (@evavivalt) start the #pdftribute movement, to spread the word about putting academic papers online for #openaccess.

Late last night, I noticed that Eva was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I tweeted to some people I know in Silicon Valley, and to some friends of Aaron’s, and then Anonymous picked it up — and we’ve now had millions of impressions and over 500 tweets per hour.

This is something we can do for the memory of Aaron Swartz, and to lead the way toward more access to the scientific process for everyone. As Eva says:

Where will this go? Well, maybe someone can scrape the pdfs together into a repository. Maybe #pdftribute can be a pledge to avoid paywalls in the future. Maybe we can push journals for more change. JSTOR’s gradual opening has been heartening, but there is still more to do.

It's a nice sentiment, but thanks to the Open Access movement, most recently published papers are already available online somewhere, and the people talking about #pdftribute are the people most likely to have already shared their papers. Important historical papers, even those that are now public domain, are still behind paywalls. As Aaron said, "even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost." [1]

Sharing your own papers is nice, but it's also safe. It's not really challenging the status quo.

[1] http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cefxMVAy

Edit: I overstated my point. I don't know that "most" papers are already available; it certainly varies a lot by field. I kind of doubt that many #pdftributers are people that weren't previously sharing their papers, though.

That is not true. I work in neuroscience and often find myself not having access to "just released" papers. Some of them may appear as preprints months later, if the author bothers to do so. I 've tried to email authors for copies a few times with no response. Even my institution doesn't provide access to all the journals we need (probably the situation is different in the US). There are actually underground websites for searching paywalled journals through proxies.

TBH, historic papers are not that interesting anymore, since the most important ones are cited in more recent research. It's the cutting edge research where it's more annoying. What's more important though is that closed-access is depriving science of the ability to use automated tools for textual analysis. I hope this unfortunate event will motivate more people to realize that having unrestricted access to scientific results is an extremely important issue.

I am in astronomy and it is common practice to post papers on arxiv.org. Because of the need for journal subscriptions and the time it takes for papers to be published, this has become the primary way we keep up with the field. I would say this has revolutionized math and the physical sciences.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the difference between fields is that, at least in astronomy, our journals are supported by the professional societies, like the American Astronomical Society, and not run explicitly for profit.

I should also add that in astronomy, the authors pay a significant amount of to the journal when a paper is published. It is usually in the range of about $100 per page.

Exactly. Arxiv is a revolutionary thing for math, physics, CS etc. Good luck getting life scientists to put their precious papers there. Most don't even pay the open access fee when the journal provides it.

Ecology has a mix of for-profit and non-profit journals, but those run by the professional societies aren't always much better. We only recently (within the past few months) won the right to post preprints on arXiv.

Historic papers are pretty useful for people in the humanities (which is why JSTOR really needs to open up).

And Wikipedia would kind of benefit from the historical stuff.

    > There are actually underground websites for searching
    > paywalled journals through proxies.

Can you hook a brother up?

Yes, please.

There are still many papers left behind paywalls. It does depend on the field you're in, as reflected by other comments.

I left academia years ago but continue to (try to) do research. Resources like scholar.google.com can often help find a free-to-read version of a paper, which is great. But access to a single key paper can make or break your progress. I've personally dropped many, many hours of work because of this problem - I couldn't reasonably access key literature that I needed.

Completely untrue in my field (biomechanics/kinesiology).

> Late last night, I noticed that Eva was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz.

That's good, but why didn't she offer them on her webpage before that? At least in the natural sciences, that is quite common now. The ArXiv is also a very popular option by now that is accepted by most journals.

For a few months now, started by a blog post of Timothy Gowers, a large group of researchers has been pushing for reform too, and in particular has been pressuring Elsevier into making their content more accessible: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ .

You know what would (probably) really be a tribute to Aaron Swartz?

Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc.

Make a website that surveys which exit nodes are in these blessed networks and turns any URL for a paywall into a rendering using that exit node to access the paywall.

Let professors, students, and staff stand with Aaron by running exit nodes that are configured to only connect to paywalls on their systems.

    > Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is
    > blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc.

I like this plan. But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Maybe we need moles in the publishing companies themselves.

> But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off?

Get more schools to do it. Get as many schools as possible to do it. How many schools would Elsevier be willing to cut off just to stop a few technically proficient users without university affiliations from accessing their stuff for free?

https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front

websites like this already exist.

Academics should already be doing this as a matter of course. If they'd like to actually show tribute to Aaron, they should:

1. Find seminal and survey papers from their fields that are unavailable on Google/Citeseer/etc, whose authors are dead/moved on/unfazed by the Internet/etc.

2. Download digital versions of these papers through their institutional access, or scan in paper copies if necessary.

3. Post them on their personal website with appropriate titling (especially important for papers that have been through scanning) such that they will show up in search engines.

I've been doing this on and off, and encouraging some colleagues to do so as well. You can't mass-upload a ton of articles without attracting unwanted attention, but you can throw up a few interesting articles in unsecured directories. People do it accidentally all the time (Google Scholar finds lots of stuff from course wikis and accidentally open directory listings and such), so you could do it "accidentally" as well.

It's also a minor way to have some influence on what gets read and cited. A lot of academics have a favorite classic paper they feel is unjustly underappreciated in their field. Why not put it online? Getting the paper into Citeseer and Google Scholar, where someone might stumble across it, is a small way to help promote underappreciated work. An underappreciated paper nobody can find is going to stay underappreciated!

As seems typical for popular Twitter hashtags, it's mostly just people discussing the hashtag itself and relatively few links to papers.

I think until a system has been built up to manage this process, any postings will be more symbolic (as tribute) than of practical value. However, that's not to say that someone will see the need for something like this and build it. The inspiration has to start somewhere.

Honest question: why don't researchers normally do this? Those in the software development do this all the time: set up a tumblr/Wordpress/whatever blog and publish our findings. If I had a dime for every time I saw an article about some benchmark of tech X vs Y...

If every research lab ran a blog-type setup where they published their findings (along with any other updates), the whole field could be revolutionized. The general public would have much more direct access to what the researchers are working on. We could even add the ability to donate to the researchers directly. This would hopefully foster collaboration as well. Instead of waiting for someone to come out with a paper to find out what they've been up to (unless you have a very close relationship with the particular researcher), you can just read their tweet/blog post/etc a la "tried sample X, results negative, but this is weird..."

Combined with a research semantic markup (think OpenGraph but for scientific concepts), this could be linked into searchable databases. Peer review could be built in, maybe even via public key crypto: "this article is signed by 17 trusted researchers".

This saves everyone money: no more having to subscribe to expensive research publications. You could have for-hire scientific editors built in as a service too. Every time you publish a paper you run it by an editor, but the editor now works for you; or you don't, and you just publish the paper and let the world decide if it is any good.

The platform itself would probably have to be fairly extensive. We would want it to be distributed so that anyone can run their own system if they choose. We'd also want to have some more centralized hubs of this type, analogous to GitHub/Bitbucket. These might include easy access to for-hire editors, Tex/LaTex support, etc. There should also be a default license for the content. Perhaps an extension of Creative Commons but with specific provisions for the peculiarities of this field.

My premise here is that while there is a whole lot of institutions that attempt to enable collaboration, they do often just get in the way. However, from what I've seen of researchers, they have the same mentality as the software developers: they want to share their findings with the largest possible audience and don't really care about much else. I think if it was easy to do this type of setup many would go along with it. What do others think?

Edit: a nice side-effect of this could be that you don't have to be associated with an academic institution to publish. Currently, I could learn, say, all there is to know about quantum physics by reading all sorts of publications and material that is more or less freely available. I could then theoretically come up with something brand new, but couldn't get my voice heard since I am not a research professor at an institution. However, with this system graduates of the likes of the Khan Academy could have the same access to publishing and peer review.

AFAIK it's two-prong.

1. A lot of people criticize self-published work on no other grounds ("not peer reviewed, won't read") 2. Peer-review and citation statistics are part of the bureaucratic game of career-academia.

There seems to be a pretty huge resistance to the old publishers and terms though, with more and more stuff going out in open-access journals.

Aaron's death will probably accelerate the change.

Is there some reason you can't both publish your research on your own site as well as in whatever publication you send it to? We could run that sort of "dual stack" until self-publishing becomes the standard.

I think a lot of the concepts from traditional publishing can be translated to this sort of online publishing. Once again, I think if it was easier for a researcher to self-publish and get peer reviews then to go through an old school publisher, then they would do it.

One reason is that some journals require you to transfer copyright to them as a condition for publication. Usually, the journals then license the paper back to the corresponding author for limited personal distribution, but sometimes it may be the case that posting your research on your website would be a violation of copyright.

For an example, here's the transfer form for the American Chemical Societies journals: http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html (the ACS has historically been one of the bigger roadblocks, along with Elsevier, to more OpenAccess reform).

IEEE has a similar copyright assignment requirement. If you want your paper in an IEEE venue (which includes many of the top engineering, robotics, signal processing, etc. conferences and journals) you are not allowed to publish it anywhere else, including on your own web site. Institutions pay big bucks to subscribe to IEEE Xplore for online access.

Many people work around this by self-hosting a very similar paper, rendered from the same LaTeX sources, but without the IEEE chrome. IEEE usually turns a blind eye.

This is not completely true. "Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE..." [1]. They also allow preprints on personal sites. The other major publishing organization in CS, ACM, has a similar policy.

[1] https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecopyrightform.pdf

That's interesting, I didn't know that clause. It looks like they explicitly allow posting the "accepted version", with the addition of the copyright attribution to the IEEE (i.e. not actually the version I wrote that they accepted!). Most people don't bother with that, and the IEEE hasn't hassled anyone I know about omitting the notice.

However, you are definitely not allowed to post the IEEE rendered version.

I extend your quote from your cited source:

"6. Personal Servers. Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE, provided that the posted version includes a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice and, when published, a full citation to the original IEEE publication, including a link to the article abstract in IEEE Xplore. Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their papers."

They do! Or at least they are starting to. At least in physics/math in my experience most people have a personal homepage that they post their papers to, and also upload them on ArXiv. There is some complication with regards to copyright, because to publish in a journal you usually need to assign the exclusive rights to them. Nowadays most journals have realized the need for authors to post their papers on personal homepages and e-print services like the ArXiv, so that this is no big deal in practice.

There are still problems: 1.) Usually old papers are not available via this route. If you email the author and ask nicely he will usually send it to, but at least in pure mathematics one quite common wants to look up really old articles, say from the 1950s, and those are the ones that are terribly hard to come by, because they are often only available behind a paywall like JSTOR.

2.) Currently "prestige" and peer review is handled through the journal system: Authors send their papers to a journal for publication, other scientists review them (for free), and then the paper gets published (or not). Afterwards publishing houses, who add little value to the process, force libraries to pay horrendous amounts of money to get access to these journals (usually through selling bundles).

At the moment there are efforts underway to pleasure publishers into a saner pricing structure, and there are now some open access journals where usually the author pays once (if at all) and then it is free to read for everyone.

Many people also consider more radical approaches, for example, making journals simply be ArXiv overlays that point to a set of papers on the ArXiv. I have even heard suggestion of replacing peer review, at least partially, by an open review system like you suggest, and some journals have experimented with it, but it does not seem to have a lot of consensus behind it at the moment. But this is in a way orthogonal to the problem of making research available to as many people as possible.

The problem with the very radical change that you suggest, i.e., using blogs instead of research papers, is that peer reviewed papers have proven their worth over a long period of time. It is doubtful whether simple blog posts would guarantee a similar quality over a long period of time. My personal feeling is that there would be a lot of noise and incorrect stuff drowning out the important stuff.

With regards to your edit: If you submit a paper that seems to be serious research to a journal, it will be reviewed, and if it holds up, eventually published. If the paper is decent, you'll be able get it published without being associated to an academic institution (at least in mathematics, can't speak for other fields).

Thanks for the detailed response. Just one clarification: I am not suggesting using just pure blog posts, but rather publishing properly formatted papers using a self-hosted publishing system a la Wordpress. Blog posts may or may not be added in order to promote the content.

It seems like the real issue here is prestige, which then translates to funding. "Publish or die" is how most researchers seem to live. Thus I think if we are able to show that self-publishing/distributed publishing brings the money to the researcher and the academic institution then this idea would get traction.

Re: edit. I see. That's great to know.

Ah, I see. I would still prefer the papers to also be hosted on a more reliable system (for example, the ArXiV, or an electronic journals website), simply because they become easier to discover this way and there is a certain assurance that they will stay online.

I think that Terrence Tao https://terrytao.wordpress.com/) has an interesting take on using blogs for math: He publishes in journals, but uses his blog to post lecture notes as well as short summaries of some of his papers.

But then this is not so different from a typical academics homepage: Usually you will find a list of publications (hopefully with PDFs, at least for the newer ones) and lecture notes there. But of course it differs for each author, and perhaps other fields have different conventions.

I think if the license was open enough a the paper could be hosted in multiple locations. Once again, there is already a precedent for this: when you publish anything on a blog you send a "ping" to Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to re-crawl your site since you added new content. Your post ends up in the Google Cache, Coral Cache, etc. I think a system that would proactively tell ArXiv "hey a new paper is published!" or "hey a paper has been peer-reviewed and approved by X via their GPG signature!" could solve the issue you are seeing.

> But of course it differs for each author, and perhaps other fields have different conventions.

I think this is also spot on. The research lab where I worked was a collaboration between the Physics and Chemistry departments. The technology used by the two chief researchers was radically different, despite having worked together for decades. For example, my professor and his sub-group (Physics) used LaTex to typeset all his papers. The Chemistry professor and his sub-group, OTOH used Microsoft Word. From what I understood that was pretty common for the respective fields. So much opportunity here as well as so much resistance in just these types of issues...

I like the gpg signature of peer reviewers part. It would both lend credibility to the paper, and leave a trail of reviewers. It would lessen the chance of a reviwer not taking their job seriously.

  > It seems like the real issue here is prestige, which then
  > translates to funding. "Publish or die" is how most 
  > researchers seem to live. Thus I think if we are able to 
  > show that self-publishing/distributed publishing brings 
  > the money to the researcher and the academic institution 
  > then this idea would get traction.

That's basically right. Academic researchers are evaluated on the number and quality of their peer-reviewed journal articles. Blogging is a distant secondary concern for most researchers because it doesn't contribute, in a direct way, to tenure or grants. This is changing, but slowly.

> At the moment there are efforts underway to pleasure publishers into a saner pricing structure

Perhaps a bit more of the stick and less of the carrot is what's needed... if they find carrots pleasurable, that is.

You are rising an important point. An answer why is: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.html

The short story is that scientist need "credit", as there are much more people that positions (not even to get a good position, just to get any). But the credit is given only for two things: publishing in already well-respected journals and getting citations.

In principle there is not problem with establishing an truly open journal. In practice - almost no one does (because doing anything but writing papers will very likely result in loosing academic job - as there is no credit for that, regardless how important).

However, there are people trying change the system; I wrote about it here: http://offtopicarium.wikidot.com/v1:open-science-2-0

Things are easier now thanks to academia.edu (which lets you add papers to your research profile), but a fair number of researchers I know of don't even have a personal website.

Also, having worked on websites to do with research projects, I can say there is unfortunately often a hell of a lot of red tape in getting anything going. One website hasn't been officially changed since 2003 despite a dev wordpress site being made in 2009 as they aren't allowed to change it over until all the department groups names are verified … and they keep changing do to restructuring!

Deleted comment

How many magazines about Ruby on Rails or MySQL do you read? You know that highavailabilty.com is more credible than some guy named FunkySysAdmin on a random forum. Yes, there is (much) less rigor in software development publishing than in scientific, but I think the basic model might work. Social networks such as HN help you find the right blogs. Also, researchers already have social connections. During my short stint in research as an undergrad, I was amazed at how many social connections my lab had around the world. I also found it interesting that when we published papers we made a point of emailing the PDF's to other researchers that might be interested. Through this mechanism we also often got early access to papers that were about to be published.

I think it is time for someone create an online repository where people can upload their scientific/research papers. Many top-scientist will continue to publish their manuscripts in closed-access journals to maintain their academic status. However, I also believe many of these same men & women would also quietly upload their papers to publicly available repositories.

This is the arXiv (arxiv.org). Science only, though.

Okay, I reposted the final post at my website, http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html. Thanks for your patience!

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pdftribute&src=typd

Has anybody upvoting this actually read the article? It is just a database error for me. (originally tried to read it at around 9 points).

The article was just an elaborate summary on the title by @venturejessica

It was working at the time I posted and even 2 minutes ago but I am getting a "Database Error" just like you. Here's another link which confirms the title of the article - - https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/290387879602032640. If appropriate, I can edit to change the link on the submission.

Please advice, thanks.

We are working to bring it back up. Give me another 30 mins or so. If not, we can link to the cache.

Okay, reposted on my website at http://www.jessicarichman.com/science-citizen.html. Thanks for being patient.

Link should be back up. Thanks so much!

http://google.com/search?&q=cache:http://sciencecitizen....

Sorry for the site issues -- please do read the cache below. And support #pdftribute and #openaccess!

Here's a full reprint for those who have trouble accessing.

Our tribute to Aaron Swartz – #pdftribute January 13, 2013

Aaron was an activist, a champion, and an incredibly smart guy who worked on things he really cared about. So much has been said about his life, his death, and his fight for research open access — and I’m glad to be part of this conversation.

Late last night, I noticed that @evavivalt was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I tweeted to some people I know in Silicon Valley, and to some friends of Aaron’s, and then Anonymous picked it up — and it just caught on. We’ve now had over 3.5 million impressions and over 500 tweets per hour.

This is something we can do for the memory of Aaron Swartz, and to lead the way toward more access to the scientific process for everyone.

Now is the time to participate.

If you’re in the UK, write to @ukhouseoflords using this link as they are accepting comment on these issues over the next couple of weeks. If you’re in the United States, perhaps you can help launch a similar inquiry at the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology by tweeting to @SciSpaceTechCmt.

For hackers, perhaps you can take all of the #pdftribute files and put them on a central web page. Maybe other journals will follow (or exceed!) JSTOR’s lead and give more open access. Whatever happens, let’s all be a part of it.

Please tweet your papers using #pdftribute!

@venturejessica, writing for @scicitizen, www.sciencecitizen.org.

P.S. It would be fitting if this got picked up on Reddit. Hint hint.

I was on the fence on publishing my work in a peer-reviewed journal or doing it online (I work in sports science). Aaron's death has firmly moved me to the free information camp.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com