The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto is a document written by Aaron Swartz in 2008 that supports the Open Access movement. The goal of the Open Access movement is to remove barriers and paywalls that may prohibit the general public from accessing scientific research publications. Swartz was an activist who fought against the restrictions that were placed on scholarly articles and for the right of all people to have access to scientific research.
On January 1, 1983, ARPANET, which originally used NCP protocol, shifted to TCP/IP, paving the way for the modern internet. As the use of the internet and data transfer became widespread, the world entered an age of unprecedented ease of copying and transferring information. [1] However, much information was still bounded under copyright laws. This discrepancy caused some to feel dissatisfaction in the lack of information availability, and leading to a desire to make information more accessible to the public. [2]
Open access information was brought upon by computer scientists, who shared their discoveries openly on the internet for other scientists to use as a foundation for continued work in the field. At this time, due to the lack of knowledge, this freely shared information was still limited to only a small scale community. [2] As more communities became more accustomed to using the Internet, diverse sets of individuals from a variety of backgrounds – independent researchers, professional communities, industry and commerce – began to utilize and add onto this public database. At this point servers, arXiv7 and Citeseer8 being the two main collections featuring scientific publications, took root to meet the demand of open access information by researchers. Their use became widespread, and they set a precedent for literature publications in different fields. [1]
Prior to the publication of the Manifesto, Swartz had been active in the open-source movement. During a trip to MIT after becoming a finalist for the ArsDigita prize, Swartz was surrounded by tech professionals intent on making the internet open-source. [3] Additionally, Swartz worked on other open-source projects prior to writing the Manifesto, such as working as an early contributor to Creative Commons, [4] a web organization devoted to ensuring open access to a variety of different copyrighted materials. [5] Other work includes his early programming contributions to Open Library, an organization attempting to create a comprehensive online library containing information on every book. [4] Months before publishing the Manifesto, in 2008, Swartz worked to make thousands of federal court documents public for free. [6]
The manifesto opens with the statement that "Information is Power", and makes the case that access to knowledge is a human right. [7] [8] It focuses on the availability of scientific and scholarly work online, and argues for the importance of making scholarly work widely available, along with removing existing barriers to access. [9] [10] The Manifesto identifies restrictions to information availability as a serious problem facing both the academic community and the world at large, and criticizes both the copyright laws that have led to paywalls, along with the corporate influences and perceived greed that have supported the development of legislature supporting this. [8] In the Manifesto, Swartz mentions one publisher by name: Reed Elsevier, a publisher whose articles covering a breadth of topics are hidden behind a paywall, which Swartz condemns as unethical. [11] He frames one of the goals of the Open Access movement is to ensure that academics publishing their work can make it available to everyone and not be hindered by these restrictions. [8] Additionally, Swartz addresses the role of privilege in impacting who does and does not have access to many of these information repositories, calling attention to existing socioeconomic divides that contribute to these inequities in information availability. [10] The Manifesto serves as a call to action by Swartz, and argues that making scholarly information widely available online is a moral imperative. [12] [8] In order to do so, it advocates for proponents of open access to engage in civil disobedience and condones the violation of copyright law in order to make scholarly work widely available online. [8] [12]
The content of Swartz's manifesto quickly caught the attention of government entities. The open access movement was gaining traction as Swartz's initial attack on the JSTOR paywall had brought to light the injustices of blocking citizens from publicly funded research. [13] In 2013, the U.S. Secret Service released a portion of their almost 15,000 page file on Swartz, detailing their investigation of his home and chronicling the questions asked of him about the Manifesto's "human rights" applications. [14] Swartz was facing up to 50 years in prison if found guilty of the charges against him, and remained under investigation until his eventual suicide in 2013. [9] The Manifesto and its ideas continued to spread online and databases such as JSTOR were under criticism for their inaccessible practices. In January 2012, thousands of scientists protested Elsevier, the publisher referenced within the Manifesto, for its practice of enforcing paywalls and limiting access. [11]
Some activists claim that Swartz was unsuccessful in achieving the specific goals he outlined in his Manifesto. The JSTOR collection was not released to public domain, and other activists spoke out against the illegal activities the Manifesto supported. [15] However, the symbolic ideas Swartz introduced through his Manifesto were effective in incentivizing others to take up the mantle of the open access (OA) movement. Today, many sites that once used paywalls are freely available thanks to the actions of OA activists following in Swartz's footsteps. One such activist, Alexandra Elbakyan, furthered Swartz's mission by developing an online repository she dubbed "Sci-Hub" that provides free access to over 74 million scientific journal articles. [16] Swartz and Elbakyan are both identified as Guerilla Open Access (GOA) activists, specified as such due to the blatantly illegal practices they engage in. [17] More general OA approaches prefer to advocate for the liberation of scholarly information through legal means, and thus tensions exist between OA and GOA activists in terms of the risks they are willing to take in the fight for open accessibility. [17] Some critics of the GOA movement claim to support civil disobedience, but do not support the radical ideals of GOA activists. They believe the responsibility to change belongs to policy makers and scientists. [18]
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; the website framework web.py; and Markdown, a lightweight markup language format. Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007. He is often credited as a martyr and a prodigy, and his work focused on civic awareness and activism.
Carl Malamud is an American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He founded the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for developing the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition.
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online digital copies in multiple formats, created from images of many public domain, out-of-print, and in-print books.
Quinn Norton is an American journalist and essayist. Her work covers hacker culture, Anonymous, Occupy movement, intellectual property and copyright issues, and the Internet.
Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.
Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.
In United States of America v. Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz, an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist, was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA), after downloading academic journal articles through the MIT computer network from a source (JSTOR) for which he had an account as a Harvard research fellow. Facing trial and the possibility of imprisonment, Swartz committed suicide, and the case was consequently dismissed.
The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) is a bill in the United States that would mandate earlier public release of taxpayer-funded research. The bill has been introduced in 2013, 2015, and 2017. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the Senate version, while the bill was introduced to the House by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) and Kevin Yoder (R-Kans.). The bill is a successor to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which had been introduced in 2006, 2010, and 2012.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
An open-access monograph is a scholarly publication usually made openly available online with an open license. These books are freely accessible to the public, typically via the internet. They are part of the open access movement.
Free Law Project is a United States federal 501(c)(3) Oakland-based nonprofit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. Free Law Project has several initiatives that collect and share legal information, including the largest collection of American oral argument audio, daily collection of new legal opinions from 200 United States courts and administrative bodies, the RECAP Project, which collects documents from PACER, and user-generated Supreme Court citation visualizations. Their data helped The Wall Street Journal expose 138 cases of conflict of interest cases regarding violations by federal judges.
Library Genesis (LibGen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. LibGen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users".
Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection: a 2021 study estimated, that Sci-Hub provided access to 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers, and on 15 July 2022 Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files.
Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright. According to a study published in 2018, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.
Paul Harvey Peters is the non-Executive Board Chair of online conference software provider ExOrdo and from 2015 to 2021 was the chief executive Officer of the Open Access publisher Hindawi. He is past Chair of the Board of Crossref and was President of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) from 2013 to 2019. Peters is known for his work as an advocate for Open Access, open infrastructure for Open Science, and research integrity in the published literature.
The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.
Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.
Shadow libraries are online databases of readily available content that is normally obscured or otherwise not readily accessible. Such content may be inaccessible for a number of reasons, including the use of paywalls, copyright controls, or other barriers to accessibility placed upon the content by its original owners. Shadow libraries usually consist of textual information as in electronic books, but may also include other digital media, including software, music, or films.
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