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I’ve sat through more presentations about the way to solve the copyright wars than I’ve had hot dinners, and all of them has fallen short of the mark. That’s because virtually everyone with a solution to the copyright wars is worried about the income of artists, while I’m worried about the health of the internet. Read more….
Filed by on March 14, 2013
Well done. This is something many of us wanted to see.
From the American Library Association:
On Tuesday, March 15, 2013, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) will posthumously award activist Aaron Swartz the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2013 James Madison Award during the 15th Annual Freedom of Information Day in Washington, D.C. Swartz will receive the award for his dedication to promoting and protecting public access to research and government information. Read more…
Picture of Aaron Swartz (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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“Aaron Swartz embodied the ALA’s principles that value open and equal access to information,” said Lofgren. “Aaron’s passing is a significant loss of an outspoken and passionate advocate.”
March 6, 2013, 3:12 pm
David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, argues that scholars have an obligation to publish their research in journals that make free copies available online. The Tech Therapy team talks with him about how the debate over open access to research has heated up in recent months, and invites journal publishers to give their views on next month’s podcast.
Links discussed in this episode: Memorials for Aaron Swartz Turn to Discussion of How to Honor His Legacy | Knowledge Cartels v. Knowledge Rights
Each month The Chronicle’s Tech Therapy podcast offers analysis of and advice on what the latest gadgets and buzzwords mean for professors, administrators, and students. Join your hosts, Jeff Young, The Chronicle’s technology editor, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who works with colleges, for a lively discussion—as well as interviews with leading thinkers in technology.
As a thought experiment, let’s say we “win.” Professional and academic associations go open access, as much of physics has. The Directory of Open Access Journals is able to capture the far majority of these newly free works, and in turn these are snapped up by library catalogs thanks to link resolvers and discovery services. The same happens with the Directory of Open Access Books with regards to chapters in edited volumes.
But there’s a catch: DOAJ’s search function is not, to put it politely, robust. And there’s a larger problem behind search functionality thanks to incomplete metadata. Link resolvers and discovery services that pull from that search, culling that metadata, will lead to frustrated end users who cannot access and discover what they’re looking for.
In addition, the DOAJ is overrun with new items to catalog in this scenario, creating a backlog of epic proportions. Read more…
Aaron Swartz Was Right – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
February 25, 2013
The suicide of the Internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz has given rise to a great deal of discussion, much of it centered on whether the penalty sought against him by the prosecutor was proportional to his “crime.”
The consensus so far has been that Swartz did something wrong by accessing and releasing millions of academic papers from the JSTOR archive. But perhaps it is time to ask whether Swartz did in fact act wrongly. We might entertain the possibility that Swartz’s act of civil disobedience was an attempt to help rectify a harm that began long ago. Perhaps he was not only justified in his actions but morally impelled to act as he did. Moreover, we too might be morally impelled to take action.
To put it bluntly, the current state of academic publishing is the result of a series of strong-arm tactics enabling publishers to pry copyrights from authors, and then charge exorbitant fees to university libraries for access to that work. The publishers have inverted their role as disseminators of knowledge and become bottlers of knowledge, releasing it exclusively to the highest bidders. Swartz simply decided it was time to take action.
He laid the philosophical groundwork back in 2008, in an essay entitled “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.”
Read more…
Stephanie L. Gross, MSLIS 