I'd like to apologize for only commenting on this thread now -- after several weeks, and in the midst of what is in some ways a much more important discussion, on the riots in London and elsewhere -- but I'm only now getting caught up on my e-mail after several weeks away.

Putting aside the JSTOR question and what to do to help set academic materials free, if you really truly want to be radical in this space, then the route is fairly straightforward: Refuse to sign away your rights to the work you publish. Insist instead that you retain the rights to post your work online and to deposit your work in openly and publicly available repositories. If every single member on this list does that, then increasingly those works that you all would like to read from your fellow academics will be readily available to you all. That's collective action that doesn't on the surface seem to be radical, but that has very real consequences for all the reasons that have been mentioned by the critical geographers on the list who are unemployed, retired, employed-but-with-friends-in-countries-without-JISC, etc. If you really want to fight against the establishment in this space, modify your copyright transfer forms to keep those rights you wish to retain -- and then post your materials at will! Simple! Just do it, as the commercial says ...

Science Commons has made this dead simple: http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/scae/

Power to the people.

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Andre Pusey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Now being covered by the Guardian too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/21/aaron-swartz-indicted-hacking-charges

Agree with Stuart and Ravi, but am unsure what course of action to take, having no coding or tech skills.



________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ravi baghel [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 22 July 2011 09:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: stealing journal articles?

I completely agree with Stuart and I think we definitely have an ethical duty to see the liberation of public knowledge. In my own case, I received most of my education in India, and usually in institutions without access to any journal subscriptions. If it hadn't been for "illegal access" through friends, shady websites, etc, I probably wouldn't ever have read a journal article.

In India, JSTOR at the moment charges a one time fee of $5000 and an annual fee of $2000 for institutional access to a set of IP addresses located on the institution. This implies that institutions would need to have this much money and the ability to offer a number of computers through which this data can be accessed, data which is often not even in copyright. These conditions might appear trivial, but in reality computers are a luxury for most students not in the big cities, and dollars even more so for their institutions.

To put this in perspective, even my current institution,  University of Heidelberg , Germany cannot afford a subscription to the Environment and Planning series.

As authors, we definitely need to make our own work publicly available, publish in open access journals and all that, but there is the necessity for more direct action, apart from the emails, petitions and facebook groups.

The conditions of JSTOR use are vague enough to offer hope:

2.1 Permitted Uses [...] Permitted Uses may be undertaken within the premises of an Authorized User's affiliated Institutional Licensee. Except in the case of Authorized Users who are Walk-In Users, Permitted Uses also may be undertaken remotely through secure access methods:

a. research activities;
e. on an ad hoc basis and without commercial gain or in a manner that would substitute for direct access to the Content via services offered by JSTOR, sharing discrete Textual Content or Specimens with an individual who is not an Authorized User for purposes of collaboration, comment, or the scholarly exchange of ideas;

Reading the Wired story, I think one very simple idea would be to create a plugin for firefox, that can enable one-click sharing of any JSTOR content, or perhaps only that out of copyright, onto a website that uses passwords and registration (thereby fulfilling the conditions of secure access, and discrete content sharing).

I don't have any programming knowledge so I can't do this myself, but I think the name of this plugin is obvious enough: RESTOR

cheers,

Ravi

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 12:27 AM, Stuart Hodkinson <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
This is extremely worrying, dangerous and demands a collective response from academics.

As this list is a 'forum for critical and radical geographers', perhaps we could use it to brainstorm ideas about what we could do.

Obvious starting point would be the 'petition', 'sending letters / emails' to the authorities etc, but perhaps this is the time for more direct responses, a bit like the Twitter action when thousands of people re-tweeted the joke about blowing up an airport...

some kind of coordinated mass download and publication of the same journals that Swartz has been 'liberating' from the corporate knowledge enclosures?
________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] On Behalf Of Deb Ranjan Sinha [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
Sent: 21 July 2011 23:17
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: stealing journal articles?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/swartz-arrest/

interesting points:

* JSTOR is not pursuing the legal case, the US feds are.

* Swartz used guest accounts to access the network and is not accused of any
hacking.

 * There are (unknown) limits, i.e. you can booted off the (e.g. JSTOR)
network for too much downloading.



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