Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

[Steven Schear]

Wasn't this, indirectly, the genesis for sci-hub? I couldn't afford to do
any tech R&D without it.

On Sat, Nov 9, 2019, 4:37 AM grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
>
> Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to
> keep it for
> themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,
> published over centuries
> in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up
> by a handful of
> private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most
> famous results of the
> sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed
> Elsevier.
>
> There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has
> fought
> valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away
> but instead ensure
> their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone
> to access it. But
> even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things
> published in the future.
> Everything up until now will have been lost.
>
> That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to
> read the work of their
> colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at
> Google to read them?
> Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the
> First World, but not to
> children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
>
> "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the
> copyrights, they
> make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's
> perfectly legal —
> there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we
> can, something that's
> already being done: we can fight back.
>
> Those with access to these resources — students, librarians,
> scientists — you have been
> given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while
> the rest of the world
> is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep
> this privilege for
> yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have:
> trading passwords
> with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
>
>
>
> Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by.
> You have been
> sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the
> information locked up by
> the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
>
> But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's
> called stealing or
> piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent
> of plundering a
> ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral
> imperative. Only
> those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
>
> Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under
> which they operate
> require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the
> politicians they
> have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive
> power to decide who
> can make copies.
>
> There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into
> the light and, in the
> grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this
> private theft of public
> culture.
>
> We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies
> and share them with
> the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to
> the archive. We need
> to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download
> scientific
> journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight
> for Guerilla Open
> Access.
>
> With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong
> message opposing the
> privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will
> you join us?
>
> Aaron Swartz
>
> July 2008, Eremo, Italy
>
> https://openlibrary.org/
>
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