The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto is a document published by (and widely attributed to) Aaron Swartz in 2008 that argues for transgressive approaches to achieving the goals of the open access movement through civil disobedience, willful violation of copyright and contracts that restrict redistribution of knowledge, and activities that exist in legal grey areas.
The goal of the open access movement taken up by the manifesto include the removal of barriers and paywalls that prohibit the general public from accessing scientific research publications and other forms of data. While most of the open access movement has focused on standing up new open access publishers, working with traditional publishers to switch to open access, and organizing scholars who produce and edit articles, these focuses primarily affect the accessibility of future publications. The manifesto is largely concerned with the existing proprietary articles and data that are unlikely to be released as open access by the current copyright holders.
The manifesto appears to have been written in 2008 at a meeting of librarians and was subsequently published on Swartz's personal blog. [1] Although the authorship of the document is widely attributed to Swartz, his role in writing the manifesto and the degree to which the manifesto reflected his views, especially several years later, were a contentious issue in United States v. Swartz, the US government's legal proceedings against him several years later. [1] US government prosecutors sought to use the manifesto to argue that Swartz engaged in the mass downloading of articles from JSTOR for the purpose of releasing those articles freely to the public in ways that mirror the manifesto's penultimate sentence saying, "we need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks." [1]
Prior to the publication of the Manifesto, Swartz had been active in the open source software, free culture, and the open access movements, such as working as an early contributor to Creative Commons, [2] a web organization devoted to ensuring open access to a variety of different what would have otherwise been copyrighted materials. [3] Other work includes his early programming contributions to Open Library, an organization attempting to create a comprehensive online library containing information on every book. [2] Months before publishing the Manifesto, in 2008, Swartz worked to make thousands of federal court documents from the PACER electronic document systems available to public for free. [4]
The manifesto opens with the statement that "Information is Power", and makes the case that access to knowledge is a human right. [5] [6] 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. [7] [8] 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. [6] The Manifesto mentions one publisher by name: Reed Elsevier, a publisher whose articles covering a breadth of topics are hidden behind a paywall, which the author condemns as unethical. [9] The manifesto frames one of the goals of the Open Access movement as ensuring that academics publishing their work can make it available to everyone and not be hindered by these restrictions. [6] Additionally, the manifesto 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. [8] The Manifesto serves as a call to action, and argues that making scholarly information widely available online is a moral imperative. [10] [6] 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. [6] [10]
The open access manifesto played an important role in United States v. Swartz. In the case, the US government claimed that Swartz had violated federal laws by downloading large number of academic articles from the JSTOR academic article storage systems via the open MIT computer network. [11] 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. [12] 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. [7]
Some activists claim that Swartz was unsuccessful in achieving the specific goals he outlined in his Manifesto.[ who? ] The JSTOR collection acquired by Swartz was never released to public domain. Moreover, other open access activists have spoken out against the illegal activities the Manifesto called for as counterproductive to the movement's aims. [13] In general, open access approaches have advocated for the liberation of scholarly information through legal means. [14] Some critics of the GOA movement claim to support civil disobedience, but do not support the specific tactics called for in the manifesto. They believe the responsibility to change belongs to policymakers and scientists. [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.[ citation needed ] 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] Elbakyan has been identified as a Guerilla Open Access (GOA) activist because of the transgressive and illegal practices she engages in. [14]
In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines. Unlike professional or trade magazines, scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content. With origins dating back to the 17th century, the publication of scientific journals has evolved significantly, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific knowledge, fostering academic discourse, and facilitating collaboration within the scientific community.
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 nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers 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, which regulates post-publication uses of the work.
Harold Abelson is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, creator of the MIT App Inventor platform, and co-author of the widely-used textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, sometimes also referred to as "the wizard book."
Aaron Hillel Swartz, also known as AaronSw, 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 Python website framework web.py; and the lightweight markup language format Markdown. 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 progressive activism.
Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.
Quinn Norton is an American journalist and essayist. Her work covers hacker culture, Anonymous, the Occupy movement, intellectual property and copyright issues, and the Internet.
Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge.
The Academic Spring was the designation, inspired by the Arab Spring, used for a short time in 2012 to indicate movements by academics, researchers, and scholars opposing the restrictive copyright and circulation of traditional academic journals and promoting free access online instead.
Access2Research is a campaign in the United States for academic journal publishing reform led by open access advocates Michael W. Carroll, Heather Joseph, Mike Rossner, and John Wilbanks.
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. Federal prosecutors eventually charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release. Facing trial and the possibility of imprisonment, Swartz died by 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.
Library Genesis (LibGen) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to 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 2018 study estimated that Sci-Hub provided access to most of the scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers. On 15 July 2022, Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprised 88,343,822 files. Since December 2020, the site has paused uploads due to legal troubles.
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.
The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.
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.
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.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help){{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)